


Acts of Hubris

by Able_Jack



Category: NCIS
Genre: Gen, Gibbs does Gibbs things well and often, bad things happen, things get resolved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-15
Updated: 2019-10-15
Packaged: 2020-12-16 13:22:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 13
Words: 29,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21036917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Able_Jack/pseuds/Able_Jack
Summary: Gibbs has always been able to protect Abby. It's as certain as gravity, but even gravity must submit to entropy.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I originally posted this story on Fanfiction.net, approximately 900 internet years ago. People still seem to like it, so I'm porting it over. 
> 
> As said in the warnings, it deals with sexual assault.

It's late.

There has been a lot alcohol between now and the wayback beginning of the night, but things are good. Things are rolling. The music and the adrenaline are twining low down in her belly, the quicksilver fingers running the column of her neck giving it a living pulse. So she pushes her head back in laughter that she can feel but not hear, baring her throat, because the night is crystalline perfection and the beauty of the man in front of her means that she herself is beautiful.

The fingers drop down her arm to circle her wrist, she follows the tugging through the crowd and the heavy smell of smoke and sex. Outside. She should come down now, away from the people, out where the music is a dull thumping, but the angle of his shoulder blades under the shimmer of his shirt keeps everything buzzing.

His mouth is a crescendo, so loud she doesn't know about the knife until it's already against her skin.

"Relax." His smile reassures. "It feels good." Seduction laces his voice and the slim blade he holds so expertly, and she feels curiosity stir. Medial cubital vein, inside of the elbow. Safe.

But no. No. She might let the party pull against the edges of her discrete consciousness, might follow a stranger into an ally, but this is too deep. Go too far into the dark and there is no light to show the path back. She holds herself carefully, shakes her head.

But his hand is hard against her throat, holding without apparent effort. His free hand folds around the scalpel handle and she knows a deep terror of having the blade near her eyes as his fist crashes into the side of her face.


	2. Chapter 2

"Gibbs." The voice was un-slurred, only marginally wary. He was either awake, or used to being woken unexpectedly.

"Hello, this is Nurse Leopold calling from Beth Israel Hospital." In the early days of making these calls she had tried for gentle compassion. A voluntary penance for shattering someone's middle of the night with a waking horror. Nowadays she was efficient, and tried to intuit whether the inevitable pause was shock, or a building heart attack. "Am I speaking with Leroy Jethro Gibbs?"

"Yes."

She filled the quiet that most people made shrill with their fear and demands."I'm calling on behalf of Abigail Sciuto. She is here in our emergency room and would like you to come."

He didn't waste time asking for details she was not allowed to give. Simply said, "Tell her I'll be there in 30 minutes," before clicking off the line. Nurse Lepold looked at the phone in bemusement and wondered exactly who Leroy Jethro Gibbs was.

* * *

It took 27 minutes, door to door, but the triage nurse guarding the admission window was unimpressed by the NCIS shield Gibbs waved under his nose and wasted another three before deciding it was okay to let the man pounding on the counter into the treatment area.

Gibbs found Abby curl on her side, laying on an exam bed. Her hair had been taken out of its pig tails and like Sampson, she seemed to have been robbed of her strength. Her makeup had been scrubbed away and the right side of her face had bloomed into shades of red and purple. A cut across her cheek had been closed with a precise line of butterfly strips.

Abby caught sight of him as he moved into the room, her eyes followed him but her face remained impassive. Her wrists were livid and puffy. The knuckles rawly oozing, the nails broken and split. Seeing them made a barbed tendril of dread curl in Gibbs' stomach.

He drug a chair close to the head of the bed and put his hand down on the mattress, palm up with the fingers curled loosely. "I'm here, Abby." She slid her own hand over until they were palm to palm. He squeezed once, a ghosting of pressure. "I'm here now."

* * *

Early morning Emergency Rooms are secretly efficient places. Not yet swamped by the needy, the staff can run tests and hand out verdicts smoothly. But the inmates, isolated into their rooms and closed behind curtains know only the drag of seconds.

Gibbs was watching people move past Abby's room, trying to interpret the semaphore code of scrub colors when a woman walked in. She wore light blue scrubs and had a stethoscope looped around her neck. Doctor.

"Hello again Abby. I see your friend made it." She smiled, the groves around her mouth settling into familiar lines, offering her hand. "I'm Dr. Elizabeth Snyder."

Gibbs half stood and shook with his free hand. "Jethro Gibbs." She nodded to him, then moved her attention back to Abby, who had rolled onto her back, leaning against the recline of the bed. A ring of darkening bruises showed above the collar of her hospital gown.

Dr Snyder flipped open the chart in her hands. "Okay Abby, I got the results from your CAT scan. You have a concussion, but no bleeding in or around your brain, which is good news. The MRI showed that your kidneys and liver are bruised, but again no active bleeding, which means they will heal on their own." She looked up to make sure Abby was following her. Satisfied, she continued. "We also took some images of your throat, which showed a fair amount of swelling, but nothing cracked or broken. You'll be hoarse though, until the swelling goes down, so try to keep talking to a minimum."

The doctor closed the chart and braced it against the bottom rail of bed, hands folded across the top. Her eyes flicked from Abby to Gibbs, then back. "Now that we've ruled out any surgical injury we can finish up with the rest of the exam." She paused delicately. "Should I have someone show Mr. Gibbs to the waiting room?"

Abby shifted to look at Gibbs, touched two fingers against an unmarked bit of throat. Hurts, she signed with her other hand.

"I know." He spoke and signed back.

Abby watched him without expression. I'm your favorite? She looked up at him through her eyelashes.

"Always. Nothing could change that. Ever." He spoke with conviction, fingers moving emphatically, giving her a truth to hold onto.

Don't go.

Gibbs struggled against the burning knot in his throat that threatened to swamp him. "Okay."

* * *

They arranged his chair so he face the head of the bed. He held her hand while the doctor softly explained each step, enduring the bruising grip. Abby kept her face turned away from him, but that didn't hide the way the hinge of her jaw stood out in relief. Couldn't keep from him the sounds of her tears.

After an eternity everything had been properly collected and sealed and the doctor let Abby scoot back up the bed. She curled on her side, back towards Gibbs, who quietly took the opportunity to flex his fingers. The doctor caught him at it, and grimaced in sympathy. He smiled grimly back and reached to pull the blanket up around Abby's shoulders, letting his hand rest lightly against her upper back. She tensed at the touch.

He rubbed a couple circles over her shoulder blades, then followed Dr. Snyder's beaconing motion out into the hallway. She leaned a shoulder against the wall, hip riding on the grab rail. Gibbs mimicked her pose, arms crossed. "Tell me."

"Miss Sciuto was brought to the ER by ambulance, semi-conscious and suffering from multiple contusions, head trauma, and suspected sexual assault." Gibbs gritted his teeth against hearing it spoken out loud. "By the time we cleared her c-spine she was fully conscious. She confirmed rape, and we started a kit. We also did a peritoneal lavage to rule out internal bleeding, as well as a CAT of her head, and an MRI of her head and throat. You know the results of those."

"And the rest?"

The doctor gave him a long and measured, sucking against her upper teeth before finally saying: "You're a cop." It was not exactly a question, but he showed his badge and she nodded a couple of times.

"The pelvic exam showed routine signs of forced sexual intercourse – bruising and few small tears. Nothing that needed stitching. There was no semen, so he either wore a condom or did not ejaculate. I collected evidence for the kit, and started her on a course of antibiotics as a precaution against any sexually transmitted diseases. Mrs Sciuto agreed to an HIV test, though a more conclusive anti-body test should be done at three and six months.

"Due to the extensive and deep bruising I've prescribed some narcotic pain meds, but even with the drugs she's going to be hurting. Is there someone who can stay with her, help her along, at least for the first few days?"

"There are plenty of people who can watch over Abby." Gibbs confirmed. Dr. Snyder nodded, ready to wrap things up.

"Okay. A nurse will come help Miss Sciuto get cleaned up and give her some forms on aftercare. If you want, you can go fill her prescriptions while we work on getting her discharged." She handed several white slips towards Gibbs. He leaned forward to take them, bringing their heads close together.

"Nothing about what happened tonight is routine, Doctor."

She met his eyes. "I'm so very sorry, Mr. Gibbs." Obviously apologizing for more than just the wording. He nodded, and her own head dipped in acknowledgment before she walked past him down the hall.

Gibbs poked his head back into Abby's room, telling her he was going to fill the prescriptions and then get her some sweats from his car. She didn't respond. He waited for a moment, then left to complete his tasks.

Outside the hospital dawn was starting to turn the scudding clouds pink. There were so many things he needed to do. Call Tony to get the team mobilize. See if he could get any information from Abby so he had a direction in which to loose their inevitable fury. Call Jenny with a SitRep and alert her to order up a temporary lab tech for Monday morning. Instead he leaned his forehead against the open trunk and felt a dull surprise that something mundane as sunrise could be happening.

Eventually the angel and the hard metal made his head ache. He pushed away from the car, pulling out the clothes. He would bring them to Abby, take her home, work from there.

* * *

Tony had set his phone to vibrate last night. So he could feel it against the bass beat of the music rolling through his body. Now it made an angry rattling sound against the wooden bedside table. He watched it blearily: it looked spiteful, moving in aggressive little hops across the table. Then he realized it was a phone, and snatched it up.

He spoke without bothering to look at the caller display "Yeah, Boss!" Trying to sound as alert as possible, which failed at takeoff, crash landing into hungover-as-possible.

He winced into the tiny silence, grateful that Gibbs was not actually there to slap the back of his head. The barked "DiNozzo!" was bad enough.

Tony rubbed tiny circles into his temple, and said, "Yeah. I'm awake."

"I need you to go work a scene."

Tony tried to slide in a question under the flag of information gathering. "But it's Sunday, Gibbs. O'Neal's team is on call. Did something happen?"

No luck. Gibbs sarcasm could etch glass. "They are, DiNozzo. But I thought you might want to give your personal attention to the place where some dirtbag got a hold of Abby last night."

Tony felt himself collapse down into a pin-prick focus. "Is she okay?"

"No major injuries. Concussion. Lots of bruises, some pretty deep. Couple of deep cuts. She'll be okay in time. Call Ziva and McGee, then call Emergency Dispatch and find out where the ambulance picked Abby up."

"She didn't say?"

"Bastard choked her. She can't talk yet."

Choke hold. Tony felt a deep unease. "Boss, did – "

"DiNozzo, just get going." Gibbs interrupted, and as Tony dialed McGee's number he felt a terrible relief that he didn't have to know. At least not yet.

* * *

Thirty-Seven people had called for an ambulance between 2200 Saturday night and 0300 Sunday morning. Seventeen had been dispatched to private residences, 8 to automobile accidents, 3 to a fraternity house that had caught fire, and 2 to nursing homes.

The last four went to random acts of bad luck and street violence. A drive by shooting; a hit and run; someone pulled out of the Anicostia. And one woman found beaten and bleeding in the warehouse district.

Sandwiched between Tony (driving), and Ziva (navigating), McGee watched streets that had been prosperous a century ago slide by outside the window and wondered about those other 36 people. Were they still alive? (Probably not that guy who came out of the river. He was probably dead.) Did they have someone to hold their hand? Were they going to be okay?

Tony parked halfway down a long and deserted block that fronted a massive building of corrugated steel. McGee slid out after Ziva, who looked around and asked "What was Abby doing down here in the middle of the night?"

Tony rounded the hood of the truck, pointing to the posters plastered to the side of the warehouse. A death pale girl in the arms of a equally pale boy, his mouth on her neck, her hand on the back of his head. They both had coal eyes, black lips. They both bled.

"My guess? She and a couple hundred of her closest buddies spent last night worshiping sex death and alcohol." He looked down at the assortment of...stuff scattered across the sidewalk, "And probably a wide variety of illegal substances."

Ziva looked around glumly. "Do we even know where the crime scene is?"

"Ambulance guy said it was outside an ally." Tony squinted up and down the street. "This building covers the whole block, so it must be around the side"

"Very good Tony!" Ziva settled a camera strap around her neck. "Keep it up, and someday you might become a real investigator."

"Huh." Tony smiled sarcastically at her retreating back, "And someday you might come up with a real movie quote." Her hand flicked in a gesture that may or may not have been considered rude in Israel. Tony yelled after her, "Good! That's good. You go right, I'll go left."

As McGee watched Ziva wined Tony up he wondered who had placed the posters so evenly on the warehouse wall. Were they there to advertise, and if so, who would see them in such a deserted place? Maybe they were just to mark the spot?

"McGee!" Tony broke his train of thought. "I'm gonna go look around the other side. You start calling around, see if you can find out who sponsored the party."

Tim gripped the handle of his black backpack and asked the thing that had been behind all the other questions. "Tony, was she raped?"

Tony swallowed hard, and it was suddenly impossible to imagine that there had ever been anything boyish or irreverent inside him. "I don't know, Probie."

McGee nodded, turned away from the other man to dig for his phone. The sooner he made the calls, the sooner they could catch this guy. He was still on the phone when Ziva found the leather collar. Dyed a bright cherry red and crusted with dried blood.

* * *

There was a mirror in the bathroom.

Abby stared, fascinated by the vivid trendils of bruising that writhed against her white skin. Like they were alive, some alien feeding off her flesh. She very carefully did not reach out to touch the reflection. It would be too much. Like some vapid Lifetime character realizing that this had really happened to her.

It was one thing to live your own cliché. Something else entirely to be shoved into one by someone you didn't even know.

She turned her back to the mirror to put on the clothes Gibbs had brought.

When they left the hospital it was with an orderly and a wheelchair. Gibbs held a sheaf of papers in many colors, and a bag filled with pills. Abby had already taken some and it was good how far away they could make the world.

At the car Gibbs reclined the passenger seat back, but it was still hard to bend in the middle. It hurt, and the muscles wouldn't go. Abby let herself fall the last few inches, the headrest groaning a little under the sudden weight.

She remembered, suddenly and completely, the hollow sound her head had made against the pavement. How she had though: There's definitely a reason they call it a melon.

Maybe the drugs weren't so great after all. They made the world go...slidey. Hard to grasp. She could process okay, but the dubbing between sight and sound was just a wee little bit off. Way easier to use one sense at a time.

She let her eyes close and listened to the mutter of Gibbs thanking the orderly, the whap of the guys feet on the pavement. Then it went quite as someone displaced the air over her seat.

Not so good, not being able to see. She snapped her eyes back open. Gibbs, saying, "I'm going to buckle you in." But instead he touched a finger to her forearm, below the stitches, looked at the twin cut on her other arm.

"Abby, did he cut you? Did he have a knife?"

Her eyes slid closed without her actually giving them permission to quit. It could have been troubling, the darkness, but she was concentrating. Two questions at once was unfair. She tried to summarize both up in one nod.

Gibbs drove to her apartment, chivying her into the elevator and down the hall to bed. She watched him put his shield wallet down on the bedside table, flipped open so the metal gleamed softly in the low light. "I'll be here, Abbs."

She slept.

* * *

Inside Abby's apartment, Gibbs listened to DiNozzo's report phoned in report silently: collar, blood, footprints, cigarette butts, beer bottles, hand rolled not-cigarette butts, multitudinous drug paraphernalia. Three boxes of bagged and tagged things that probably totaled almost nothing. The moment when Gibbs should have said, Take it to Abby and could not was a painful stutter.

McGee had a phone number for the warehouse owner, and the name and address of the ambulance caller. Neither were answering their phone at 0730 on a Sunday morning.

Ziva had pictures and sketches of the scene.

Jenny had called earlier to say that The FBI was willing lend their country cousin a forensics technician, but not until Monday. He called Fornelle, who assured him anyone working in the Hoover Building on a Sunday was there from need and not desire.

Fingerprints lifted from Abby's collar were running through AFIS. So far no luck.

Gibbs rubbed his fingers against eyes that felt full of hot sand and thought about last night, the time between laying down under his boat and answering a phone call. Had that time been filled with sleep? He took too long to answer, and DiNozzo prompted, "Boss?"

"Yeah, DiNozzo. Take it all back to the Yard, start processing what you can. The forensics will have to wait until Monday. I'll be here at Abby's. Have someone come spell me around noon."

Tony answered an affirmative. Gibbs snapped his phone shut and wondered about those hours of sleep. Did he twitch? Did he know one of his own was being hurt?

* * *

As ordered, Abby's doorbell rang at 1215. Gibbs opened the door to see Ducky, looking somehow both dapper and rumpled, holding a file and a take-out sandwich. Seeing him, Gibbs felt a kind of relief ripple through his body. Subtle as two atoms releasing their bonds, but if you did it enough you had light and heat and civilization.

"Hello Jethro. Tony said you wanted someone to come relieve you. Since all your worker bees are as of yet still busy, I seemed the logical choice." The older man set the food and file on the table before hanging his hat and coat carefully in the closet.

"Now. Tell me what has happened to our Abigail." He stood behind a kitchen chair, hands gripping the top bar strongly. This man, who refused to see even corpses as just empty flesh. The one out of all of them who would still be able to see the whole of Abby through the haunting that had been laid over her.

"Beaten, raped, left in an ally."

Ducky's knuckles went white and he made an involuntary sound against a jaw set into a ridged line. "Oh, Jethro. This world can certainly be a cruel place."

"Yeah, Ducky, it can." Gibbs rubbed a hand along the back of his head, then reached for the folder. Abby's name has been typed neatly across the tab. "This everything so far?"

"Tony indicated so, yes."

Gibbs grunted and opened it. An index of things collected at the scene, sketches and measurements, and a thick packet of high contrast prints. He skimmed through them quickly, then again more slowly. Again, then again, and again. Until he could see it all with his eyes closed, until that one tiny detail jumped out. The minutia, the careless, the left behind that would catch the bastard.

Until Ducky saw him rub his eyes once too many and said, "Jethro, take a nap." He weathered Gibbs' glare with watertight integrity.

"I'm fine. I've gotten through on less."

"Yes, when you are following a lead. Right now you've no forensics, no witnesses, not even a statement from the victim. All of which means you have no leads."

Ducky ploughed right over the beginning of Gibbs counter. "Yes, you will find them. The pictures will speak to you my dear man, but only if your mind is fresh enough to understand what they are saying."

Gibbs teetered on the edge. Ducky, sensing the wavering played his trump card. "You are going to have to talk to Abby, Jethro. You owe it to her not to undertake that interview while exhausted."

He shoved out of his chair. "Yeah. All right. I'll sleep on the couch."

* * *

He slept, woke, and eventually they all came. McGee bearing pizza, holding it on the flats of his hands so he entered box first. Still believing he needed something more than himself in order to be included. Tony brought movies and the unique gift of his awful willingness to be a wick for their sadness. Ziva came with nothing, not intending to stay. Until Tony reached out to physically hauled her inside and her shoulders hunched against some rejection relaxed back down.

They made their reports: no luck tracking down the warehouse owner; no cameras guarding the entries; no forensics until the temp showed up. No one who would admitted to being at the party.

Each of them looked in on Abby, gathering at her kitchen table to eat pizza and mutually pretend that companionship was the last reason they had all come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After all this time, I find my original endnotes kinda funny. I've decided to preserve them, because jesus fuck balls, I was young.
> 
> * * *
> 
> A/N: Greetings from the 36th parallel. I want to reassure anyone who has gotten this far, that this story is complete. I will be posting it in sections as my Internet connection allows. Unfortunately, playtime takes a back seat to serious business on DoD satellites. Too much baud dedicated to fun stuff could slow down important research on how the mating habits of aquatic nematodes effects acoustic equipment. Or something like that.


	3. Chapter 3

Monday morning Gibbs woke to darkness and the sound of a clock marking each second with a self important little tock. He decided he resented being so smugly reminded of the passing time.

It had been 28 hours.

Not that it really mattered. Kidnappings, murders; they had to be solved quickly. Rape cases were a different beast. An endurance test of carefully collected evidence and meticulous forensics. Everything collated and cross-referenced to not only put the suspect and the victim in the same place, but to prove their collision course.

But for more than a day the scumbag had been roaming free while Abby suffered for his actions. It was intolerable.

Gibbs took a breath against the ache in his chest, rubbing at it. Obviously sleep was done with. He heaved himself out of the couch, twisting most of the kinks out. After three rounds of I-get-the-bed-you-get-the-couch he had excellent technique.

He made coffee and organized what needed to be done. First have someone collect the rape kit from the hospital. Then start tracking the warehouse owner. Interview whoever they found. Go from there.

He looked at the clock. Still to early to start making calls, but time for another round of pills.

He rapped lightly on Abby's bedroom door, pushing it open enough to peer through. Seeing she was awake he walked over to the bed. "Hey Abbs, I've got some food and your pills." He jounced an applesauce cup with three pills balanced on top of the foil lid.

She looked at the food and signed, No.

He squeezed a blanket covered foot. "Gotta eat in order to take the pills."

She stared. He stared back. Stalemate.

A good Marine knew never to compromise the objective. A good father learned there was more than one path to every end point. Gibbs made a trip to the kitchen and returned holding a glass of crushed pills in applesauce that had been thinned with juice.

He held it out. "Compromise. The other option involves alternative methods of entry. Trust me, I know."

She drank.

He sat nearby until she fell back asleep, sitting in a chair upholstered in deep blue satin that looked like it could have been ripped straight out of some coffin. Knowing Abby, it might have. From the vantage he could see that the nurse had been perfunctory in helping her get cleaned up. Dirt was smudged across her skin in places, and a rill of dried blood threaded along the curve of her ear.

When she woke up he would see if she wanted to get cleaned up. Then maybe they would talk.

* * *

Tony was already driving towards the Navy Yard when Gibbs called his cell. It hurt like a bitch, actually knowing. A tumbled knot of sorrow and creeping shame. Guilt by mutual association of a Y chromosome.

"I wish I didn't have to be doing this, Boss."

"Not more than Abby." Gibbs voice was soft.

"Yeah."

He disconnected, pulling a U-turn that made the tires gasp for pavement. Racing down the pre-dawn roads, 60 in a 35 zone. No lights or sirens chased him, which was really too bad. Being an asshole to some street cop would have been okay.

He flashed his NCIS badge at the hospital and they gave him the evidence box in return. He signed the receipt and the chain of evidence chit without comment and the nurse wished him a good day. Like it was completely reasonable to be picking up the derailment of someone's life and tucking it under your arm.

As a rookie cop, working shifts in the evidence locker, he had marveled at the way pain and suffering could be sealed into a box. Violence neatly labeled and stacked floor to ceiling. So much that the shelves should have creaked under the weight. It had been a long time since he had felt like that.

He put it in the back seat.

The Navy Yard was still quiet when he pulled up to the gate, but McGee's public show of wealth was in the lot, and Ziva's smug little zoom-zoom chick car.

Both Autopsy and Forensics were locked tight, dark and neglected feeling. Which was frustrating because they had nothing right now. Only the name and address of the warehouse owner who had enough money for a bulldogish secretary and a weekend ticket to Vegas. He would be back mid-morning thank you very much.

So he had to take the box up to the bullpen. Ziva sagged back in her chair when he rounded the corner from the elevator. McGee surged forward, eager for the box sealed with evidence tape, only to look stricken when he realized.

They watched him set the box down next to his desk. "New lab rat's not here yet. Any luck on the fingerprints?"

Ziva tore her eyes away from the box, shaking her head. "No hits in AFIS or in the Metro Sex Offender's Database. She looked back at her paperwork, but her pen stayed flat on her desktop. McGee just blinked into space. Tony booted his computer and idly watched the splash screen flick. The ringing of the phone made them all jump. Security, calling in the new lab technician.

* * *

Tony stood halfway through the lab door, staring at the inhabitant. Abby was going to be pissed when she found out whatever experiment she had been running in the back room had hatched while she was away. Broken out of incubation to wander around her laboratorium dressed primly in a starched white coat.

The man, or whatever, stood at the computer desk, leaning forward to touch one of Abby's little goth figures next to the monitor. He caught sight of Tony and started abruptly sideways, snatching his hand away with a little hop. Tony watched the sudden motion judder through the guy's joints. Up the arm and down the back and out through the toes. Like he was some high-school biology class skeleton, tied together with wire and magicked into life by some kid with a really crappy magic wand and a poor understanding of musculature.

The man eventually worked out how his arm should hang from the shoulder joint, looking at Tony with a crinkle between his eyebrows. "Hello, are you one of the lab techs? I'm Larkin Jones. The FBI sent me over to temp for you guys."

"Ichabod," Tony whispered, followed by a ghostly whap to the skull that jump started him all the way into the lab. He smoothed a hand against his hair and forced a smile that hopefully made it at least to ingratiating. "I mean, no, sorry. I'm Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo." He set the box down next to the three from the alley and stuck out his hand.

Shaking was a little like having his hand engulfed by the mother of all daddy long legs. He ended it as soon as possible. "Welcome to NCIS."

Larkin smiled uncertainly. "Thanks." His eyes slid to the boxes on the counter. "Looks like you guys keep busy."

Tony turned his head, pulled in by the boxes' gravity. "Yeah."

Larkin shuffled his feet, looking like a broke leg stork. "Uh, you want me to get started on the box you brought down?"

"Yes. It's a rape kit. Start with anything that might have some DNA evidence." He had to say it. This guy needed to know what he was looking for. Still, he had to force it out.

Larkin nodded, fingers fluttering down towards the sealing tape. Tony turned to leave, but swiveled back around at Larkin's call. For a freakishly tall scarecrow he managed to pull off lost puppy very convincingly. "Do you know when the other techs usually get in?"

"This is NCIS. You are the tech."

"Oh," His adamsapple bobbed. "In that case, do you know where the gel sequencer is?"

The pressure of how wrong this all was squashed the air out of Tony's lungs. It hurt.

"No."

* * *

Tim listened to DiNozzo update Gibbs about the new lab tech and the utter lack of fingerprint matches. Then something about pumpkins and horsemen that made Gibbs bark hard enough that Tony jerked his ear away from the static overload on the microphone. But it was all background to the knowledge pressing down on his brain.

He had suspected. Now he knew and it was...it was...

Middle-school, high-school. He knew what it was to be pinned down. To fight with every ounce and still loose. Standing up full of rage that you didn't have enough power to make it stop. But nothing like this. Never this. Someone had held Abby down and...and...

It wouldn't fit, like one of those tangle puzzles, the facts endlessly sliding past each other and refusing to come into alignment. His thoughts spun endlessly, refusing to settle.

He startled away from the fingers snapping inches from his ear. "Probie! You with us?" From Tony, who had somehow come to be standing by his chair.

He craned to look at the other man. "What?"

Tony returned the look, concerned. "I was saying; Boss wants you at Abby's. Presumably he wants your brain, too, since we know he didn't hire you for looks."

McGee pushed his chair back from the desk. "Sorry. I was thinking."

Tony gave him room to stand. "Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple of thinking to precisely on th' event?"

Tim stopped mid jacket grab to stare at DiNozzo. "What's that supposed to mean?"

DiNozzo went back to his desk, leaning back in his chair. "It's Shakespeare, Probie. It doesn't have to mean anything."

He shoved his arms into his jacket, walking to the elevator. "Whatever. I'm leaving."

From behind him Ziva said "Irving and Shakespeare all in one morning. Someone has been civilizing you, Tony." But the doors dinged shut on DiNozzo's reply.

Traffic was light and Tim let the trip to Abby's building slide by on autopilot. He knocked on her door; plain, black, punctuating a long hall of plain, white. The Super had had an absolute fit, but Abby had smiled pretty, gravely promising to repaint it if she moved. He had sputtered, and she had dimpled, until he had walked away, won over by the unstoppable force that was Abby.

Gibbs opened the door, and he looked so solid standing there, so competent and familiar that Tim felt a desperate wave of longing for him to make everything okay. Make Abby be fine. Make the swirling thoughts in his head settle. He squashed it. This wasn't a bedtime story and Gibbs the hero of wishful thinking. This was about as adult as it got.

"Hey, Boss." If his voice sounded strangled, Gibbs had the compassion not to notice. "How's Abby?"

"Sleeping. She'll probably wake up in a little while. If not, you'll have to. Pills are in half an hour. Crush them up into some applesauce and make sure she eats it all. She needs the calories. Get some water into her too."

"Okay."

Gibbs put his hand on the doorknob, but didn't open it. "Abby had her license and credit card on her the other night. If he saw them, then this guy know where she lives."

Tim absorbed the information. "I've got my weapon, Boss. I'll keep an eye out, call you if I see anything."

Gibbs glanced back over his shoulder. "I wouldn't have expected otherwise, McGee." He paused. "Just remember, questions are second."

Gibbs eyes were direct, and if there was any extra weight to the look Tim would deny it to God himself. Just a joke in stressful times, Lord. "I understand."

Gibbs nodded and shut the door with a soft click.

Tim made some coffee and read pill packets while it brewed. An antibiotic, an anti-inflammatory, and some impressive painkillers. Gibbs had written down the times she had taken them on a scrap of paper. The antibiotic and painkillers were due.

He knocked on Abby's door, awake as predicted. He clenched the applesauce cup as shock worked down into his bones. In the light, with time to fully form, the bruising was terrible. Her eyes moved over him and her fingers moved in a sequence.

"Are you asking about Gibbs?"

She nodded.

"He went to go get a shower and change. He'll be back in a while. I've got your pills. Gibbs said they were easier to take in the applesauce."

She looked mulish. Tim felt the opening trickle of dread. Gibbs had made it pretty clear that she was to take the pills, but no one could push Abby into something she didn't want.

Hard on the heels of that thought was remembering that someone had.

"Bathroom first. Bath." A rusty rasp, sounding nothing like Abby. Clearly painful.

"You up to that?"

She nodded emphatically. He helped her out of bed and across the hall. She moved in a stiff shuffle, trying to avoid bending in the middle. They had to take a break half way there, to breath and wipe away the sweat beading on her forehead.

Finally they reached the bathroom and he eased her down onto the closed toilet lid, where she sat looking at the floor while he twisted the taps. Eventually he found the right temperature and set the plug. He touched her shoulder. "Abby...will you be able to get the shirt off?"

She bit her lip and went ridged.

He pulled his hand back, the words spilling over. "It's going to hurt you. To lift the shirt up. We'll cut it off. I know where the scissors are. We'll cut it off." He rummaged, finding the scissors and a set of pajamas with buttons up the front.

She stood while he ran the scissors up the back of the sweatshirt. It sagged open, mortally wounded, to show the cross on her back. Once, a long time ago he had traced the filigree and she had shivered under his touch. Now she shivered from it.

He left her to slip off the mutilated shirt, retreating to the couch with burning eyes and something acidic churning in the bottom of his stomach. He returned to the couch, listening to the water run and tried very hard to think about nothing.

The pills were close to an hour late.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Original note:
> 
> A/N: Okay folks, 4 parts in and a plot line has actually started to develop! Thanks to everyone who has reviewed or subscribed to this story. It's quite a feeling to know my writing is worthy of positive comment. It pretty much makes my day.

Gibbs went home for a shower and fresh clothes, driving back to the Yard afterward. He found three empty desks and a note in DiNozzo's neat script explaining that he and Ziva had gone to interview the warehouse owner. Without sitting, Gibbs reversed course back to the elevator, hitting the button for forensics.

The loaner technician was studying something in one of the microscopes, bent nearly double to reach the lens. Gibbs cleared his throat and he snapped upright. It took a while.

"Hi, I'm - "

"Larkin Jones, I know. What have you got so far?"

The man squinted with suspicion. "Are you Agent Gibbs?"

An incredulous head tilt and a hard look got him back on track.

"Right. Well. I identified seven sets of shoe prints from the alley, including the ones that matched the shoes from the rape kit. Three came from Doc Martins brand, one set of high heels, and the other two are still unknown. Dirt samples indicate four of the wearers were using the alley to, uh, relieve themselves. Including the high heels which is weird because the splatter indicates a higher..."

Gibbs glared and Jones self corrected. "The rape kit was negative for semen, but there were a few hairs that did not match the victim. I'm running them for DNA, along with the skin cells from the fingernail scrapings."

Despite himself Gibbs felt a measure of approval. Larkin continued on. "I printed the pictures from the rape kit." He picked up a stiff envelope, but kept holding on after Gibbs had grabbed it.

"Agent Gibbs, I met a woman named Abigail Sciuto once. At a seminar on forensic science. She was pretty, um, odd, but she's the smartest person I've ever talked to. She worked for Naval Criminal Investigative Service. I remember because she told me to pull my head out of my ignorant FBI ass when I didn't know what NCIS stood for."

He let go of the envelope. "I wanted to tell you I'm treating this evidence the speed and discretion it deserves."

Gibbs tapped the sharp corner of the envelope against his palm, watching Jones look back at him with a determined gaze. He gave the other man a nod before leaving, hiding a smile, because damned if DiNozzo wasn't spot on. Ichabod Crane.

Back at his desk he opened the envelope, spilling a thick stack of prints and one of those little memory chip gizmos. He put the chip back into the envelope and looked through the hard copies. They were from a lower resolution camera than NCIS used, but still carefully composed and marked with location and scale. He supposed it was nice to have proof there actually were institutions with budgets lower than NCIS.

DiNozzo and David returned just as he finished going through the pictures a second time. Nothing there he didn't already know. He flipped the whole group upside-down as the two agents stopped in front of his desk.

"Hey, Boss. McGee with Abby?" Tony asked.

Gibbs raised his eyebrows and looked significantly at McGee's empty desk. Tony looked abashed.

"Right." He regrouped. "Ziva and I were out interviewing the owner of the warehouse, and quite a fat cat Mr Davidson turned out to be. Emphasis on fat. He must have weighed 400 easy. He wheezed just walking across the room. Really makes you think about what kind of crap we put into our bodies."

"So you won't be wanting that?" Gibbs pointed to the pizza box sitting on Tony's desk.

Tony made a whuffeling noise of surprised and leaned a little towards the box. "Never make decisions on an empty stomach, Boss.

"Davidson runs an import/export business and owns four warehouses in the DC area. Started in 1993 at the warehouse in question, then moved to a larger complex in 2001, leaving the original property to be used mostly for overflow storage. He occasionally rents it out, most recently to a man named Arron Forrest who organizes parties of the roving type. Payment was in cash since Forrest was reluctant to file the necessary permission-to-gather permits. A company called Eckhart Security monitors the property for break-ins, passive devices only, no cameras. They didn't make any rounds Saturday night or Sunday morning because of the party. Did you get sausage and pepperoni?"

"What's next?" Gibbs demanded, ignoring the question.

"We run down Arron Forrest, find out some background. The only thing Davidson had was a phone number." Armed federal agents preferred going into situations knowing more than a contact number. Especially when the interviewee had a desire to avoid police notice.

Gibbs nodded, "Okay."

They continued to stand at his desk. He made an impatient shooing motion. "Go. Eat."

Tony pounced on the pizza box and had half a piece folded into his mouth before Ziva made it across the aisle. She pulled a face and shook her head before taking her own piece.

Gibbs left the photos on his desk, turning to his computer instead. He called up search pages for the Maryland, Virgina and D.C sex offender databases. Looking through them would be nothing more than a shot in the dark. A search through official police records had yielded no recent hits for men who preyed on party goers, and state public registries usually concentrated on crimes against children. Still, some dirtbags had been nabbed with slimmer odds.

It took Gibbs several descriptions too many to remember that computers had no sense of disgust. He swore, flicking his phone open to dial McGee's mobile.

He picked up after two rings. "Hi Boss."

Gibbs dove in without preamble. "McGee, can you make a dohicker that will automatically search through a database?"

"What kind of database?"

Gibbs squinted at the computer screen. "I don't know McGee. It says h.t.t.p."

"Then it uses TCP/IP." McGee said. "That's good. As long as I can find out what storage schema the database uses, I can use Directory Access Protocol to write a Search and Compare script that will look through the database for specific words."

Gibbs latched onto the 'that's good', figuring it meant McGee could do what he wanted. "How's Abby?"

At their desks both Tony and Ziva abandoned all pretense of work, watching him quietly.

"Awake. Talking a little."

Gibbs tucked the phone against his shoulder, shoving the evidence pictures back into their envelope. "Okay. I'm headed your way. You come back here and write a thing that will search through the tri-state sex offenders registries for guys who like parties." He put the envelope on DiNozzo's desk and hung up without waiting for an answer.

Tony picked up the packet. "How's Abby?"

Gibbs walked towards the elevator. "Talking."

* * *

The living room was flooded with late afternoon sunlight when Gibbs let himself back into Abby's apartment. It smelled of honey and lemon and the television muttered in the background. McGee and Abby were both sitting on the couch. McGee's hand moved away from his holstered weapon, Abby's were wrapped around a steaming mug.

They both looked at him. McGee attentively, Abby with a slower focus. She was sitting up, covered carefully with a blanket and willingly drinking something. Gibbs gave McGee a mental good boy.

"Hey." She greeted him.

He smiled to hear her voice, rough as it was. "Hi, Abby."

Gibbs jerked his head in the direction of the door. Less than an order, more than a suggestion. McGee stood, gathering his jacket. Abby watched him until the door shut, then looked steadily away from Gibbs.

He looked her over. She was breathing too fast, and beyond that he had no idea. It made his guts churn. Everyone had mechanisms to hid things. Ducky had words; Tony could close himself up like a fan; Ziva alchemized unchecked emotion into anger; McGee absorbed every barb to mask the ones that sunk in. But Abby had always been wide open.

"Abby, we need to talk." She nodded, watching her own hands smooth the blanket over her crooked knees.

"I know." Still not looking at him, working hard to talk.

"Still hurts?" Gibbs asked. Abby grimace was answer enough."Okay, we'll keep this short."

He sat, ignoring how unnatural the role reversal felt. Silence was his realm, and he didn't know any of her tricks to banish it. "Abby, do you remember anything? Something that would help us catch him?"

In response Abby sat, fingers unmoving on the blanket, watching something far away. For long enough that Gibbs wondered if he should repeat the question. Was about to when her head finally ghosted back and forth at one-quarter speed.

Gibbs rubbed a hand against the back of his head and blew out some air. "You sure? Nothing?"

Still looking into the distance, she said, "Nothing."

Gibbs switched tactics. "Okay. Lets start from the beginning, see if anything comes up. Did you work Saturday?"

Abby nodded.

"What time did you leave?"

"1900."

"Did you go straight to the party?"

Head shake.

"So you went home first?"

Nod.

And so it went. Until Gibbs knew that Abby had left her apartment around 2130, catching a ride with friends, staying behind when they went home just after midnight. Until the nods and words slowed like a clock unwinding and she toppled forward over her own knees.

He lunged forward to catch her in a tight hug, cradling her head against his shoulder as her forehead battered against his collarbone and her fists twisted into his shirt, rocking them both in the syncopated rhythm of her anguish.

Shock, he knew, and trauma. Retreating to the same place as injured Marines and the ones who had seen their buddies transformed into ragged flesh and pink mist. Hell, he'd been there twice himself. But still, the frustration. The urge to shake and yell until he jarred loose a memory he could use. A cruel thing to do to anyone, impossible to use it against Abby.

That's it, he thought, nothing more here. Except Abby, with the contradiction that had always been her way, said: "I danced with him."

Gibbs pulled her tighter against what would surely be bruises by morning. "Not your fault, Abbs. You couldn't have known."

"Should have." Her voice was full with the millions of ways the night could have ended differently. Each one visible only in hindsight, stretching out in a chain that choked with bitterness.

"How?"

"Second time." She said against his chest: shame on me his mind filled in.

Gibbs knew about this, too. How the mind would force together splintered cause and effect in order to reject a chaotic system The first time was Mikel Mawher, written off as bad luck. The second time was entered as hard evidence. The subconscious whispering that such brutal punishment must be deserved. Could not be random. Until a wife and child die because you left them behind; a man reaches out with evil intent because you danced to close, flirted too much, held too long.

Gibbs blinked with burning eyes. He would find this guy. Find him and hurt him for putting that kind of doubt into her.

"No," He tighten his arms, trying to force his conviction into her, "this is not your fault. Give me something, Abby. Please. Help me to find this scumbag."

Abby pushed away, breaking his embrace and drawing into herself. "Why?" She asked with a voice that was hoarser than just swollen vocal chords. "Justice?"

Gibbs looked at the tears on Abby's cheeks and thought about Mexico. How the heat had brought sweat that stung his eyes and made the trigger slippery under his finger. Finally saying, "Yeah, something like that."

She went back to watching the middle distance through the window. "No such thing."


	5. Chapter 5

"Our rapist mixed his metaphors."

Both Tony and McGee looked up from their computers, neither sure where to start with that one.

Ziva rolled her eyes, tapping a finger on the close up of one of Abby's lacerated arms. "These are not defensive wounds. They were made on purpose, and judging by the straight edges it was after he subdued her.

"A ritualistic rapist might have made these kinds of cuts, but he would not have stopped there, and he would have taken her to some other location where he could play out his fantasy without risk of interruption. He would have stalked her and planned every step in order to draw the whole thing out.

"This man is an opportunist. Impulsive. Catching who he could and using a nearby alley. He cared about gratification, and would have wanted to finish quickly in such an exposed location." Ziva looked up at Tony and McGee. "So why did he take the time to cut open not one, but both her arms?"

Tony cocked his head. "Officer David, have you been studying your Junior Profiler flashcards again?"

Ziva shot him a narrow eyed look. He came around the front of his desk, hitching a hip against the front ledge, and even as she glared at him for being Tony he became the man he had been while Gibbs was gone. "Could it be a calling card?"

"Yes. Or he could be moving from opportunist towards something more elaborate."

"Maybe he just has a thing for blood."

McGee jerked his head towards Tony, looking pole-axed. Ziva just grimaced. "Any of those scenarios would mean that he is going to try again."

McGee had abandoned Tony and Ziva's back and forth in favor of clicking furiously through photos on his computer. "Guys, I just thought of something – the blood."

He brought up the now familiar picture of the alley onto the plasma screen. "We all missed it, because we didn't see the pictures of Abby until after we processed the scene. None of us noticed it, because it wasn't there."

Tony squinted into the screen, trying to see what wasn't visible. Then he caught himself, twisting around to glare at McGee.

"No blood!" Excitement was making his ears flush pink.

Ziva caught the idea. "You are right, McGee. The blood on her collar was from her face, but there is nothing like the volume that would come from the cuts on her arms."

The three shared an uneasy look, and Tony made a disbelieving little sound through his nose. "Which one of us is going to tell Gibbs that NCIS is chasing an escalating serial rapist who takes his victim's blood as a souvenir?"

"The FBI would be here in ten seconds." McGee's voice was the low tone of awed wonder and dread.

Tony leveled a finger at him."You called the Devil's name, Probie. Just for that I should make you call Gibbs."

A look of tension flashed across McGee's face, but Tony continued before he could protest. "Except I'm going to make Ziva call Gibbs." He craned his neck around towards her. "Think of it as a reward for such an astute profile."

She gave him a level stare, sorting ridicule from complement, stalking over to her desk without a hint of her decision. He grinned hard as he watched her sit down, then went back to McGee. "You and I are going to go interview the party dude."

* * *

The owner of the party company had a tiny office in a large building on a block with terrible parking. He was dressed in neatly pressed chinos with a button down shirt. His hair was sandy blond, and there was absolutely no trace of eyeliner.

He looked up when they entered. "Yeah? Can I help you?"

McGee said, "Are you Arron Forrest?"

"Yes." Clean Pressed Guy nodded.

"Who runs Underground Parties Inc?" Just to be sure. The guy looked so normal.

They had made him uneasy. He stood up, fingers braced on the desktop. "Yes, I'm Arron Forrest; and yes, I own Underground Parties. Is there something I can help you with?"

"Special Agents McGee and DiNozzo." They flash their badges and shields. Unless you specifically said otherwise everyone just assumed FBI. McGee had learned to accept the twinges of conscience as a fair trade for the time saved by not having to endlessly explain what NCIS was.

Arron's eyebrows rose. "Woah, Federales. Something happen at one of my parties?"

"A woman was attacked early Sunday morning at your party in the warehouse district. We're trying to find the guy who hurt her."

"That's it?"

The open skepticism made Tony twitch. McGee glanced at him before looking back at Arron, puzzled. "Yes." He said.

The blond man scoffed. "No way man. Fed's don't waste time on chicks who get stupid. She'd have to be holding the nuclear codes or something."

Tony moved faster than McGee could catch him. Arron sat down hard as a man with four inches and thirty pounds on him leaned across the desk, mimicking his earlier pose with more menace than Arron could ever hope for.

"Hear that McGee? Genius boy doesn't sound like he respects women much. Callin' em stupid and all. Makes him sound a little bit misogynistic."

McGee, watching how the smile on Tony's face did nothing but hone the bright glint of malice, said slowly, "Yeah, Tony. I heard him."

"Well, lets give him the benefit of the doubt here McGee. Lets not label him unfairly. Maybe he was absent the day they taught that being bigger and stronger doesn't mean you get to just take whatever you want."

Tony wrapped his fingers around the edge of the desk, heaving it up an inch just to drop it back down in a clash of metal. Arron shrank back. "Maybe he needs a make-up lesson on why the inviolate right to ownership of your own body is one of the things that makes this nation so great."

Arron escaped by rolling his chair back until he could sit up straight. "Okay, jeez, I'm sorry. I thought you were trying to shut me down. Cause of drugs, or under-aged kids, or whatever the hell those vampires do down there. What do you want to know?"

Tony backed off. "Names. Who attended; who DJ'ed; who was in charge of security."

"I can tell you who does the music and security, but I can't give you a list of who went."

Tony shifted feet. Arron flinched back. "Because it doesn't exist! People come, they pay the cover, they get a stamp. No one takes names at a thing like that."

"Fine." Tony said, moving to lounge against a wall. "We'll just wait for you to print that information off."

Outside McGee held tight to the lists and watched Tony. "Did that come from a movie?"

"Did what come from a movie?"

"What you said to Forrest."

Tony slipped on his shades. "Probie, sometimes you just have to ad-lib."

McGee knew he should let that be the end, but the hatred he saw on Tony's face was something he couldn't stop probing. "Inviolate right?" he asked.

DiNozzo shot him with a thumb and forefinger before walking away quickly enough that McGee had to trot to catch up.

* * *

Ziva was sitting in the bullpen, watching the phone and feeling the loneliness of the usually vibrant space. Tony and McGee were out interviewing party security. Gibbs was at Abby's. Around her the hum of the building grew louder as the other agents filtered out, headed for somewhere else.

The phone proved to be fairly boring. She switched to looking out the window. The moon was full, the silver light making everything outside strange and flat. She watched it, and thought that 28 nights from now the Solstice moon would rise and millions would kneel before the figure of a man dying on a cross.

Abby loved Easter. The pageantry and the ritual, not to mention the gruesome death, were right up her road. Personally, it left Ziva cold. How much difference could there be between a man who sought redemption for his people on a cross, and one who used a suicide bomber's vest?

Saying that to Abby had been...unwise. Ziva smiled to remember how Abby's eyes had slitted and her finger had poked. That first year in America, when the woman had still hated her for a list of reasons that started with Kate and ended with dead.

Ziva sighed. She needed to be calling Gibbs, not reliving memories and letting the words of the Kaddish run through her mind. Abby was not dead.

She picked up the phone, told Gibbs about the missing blood and the team's suspicion that they were dealing with an escalating serial rapist.

He summed it up in one word: "Shit."

Ziva tended to agree.

Gibbs sighed something long and complicated. "Put out a BOLO with a note to contact NCIS about anything unusual associated with a rape case."

"That is very vague," Ziva protested. "How will they know what to look for if we do not tell them?"

"You want the local LEO's crawling up our asses on this, Ziva?" There was an element of tight control in his question. "Or the FBI?"

"No, but I do not want to miss him because we failed to share information." Ziva's voice was not so carefully modulated.

"Metro can't do anything we can't, except get in the way."

"And speak to Abby." The quality of silence on the other end told her the barb had set. "Gibbs, Abby is a witness. Our only witness. To a crime that the perpetrator shows every sign of committing again. You are trying to protect her at the expense of the case."

There was a deadly silence, then Gibbs' chill voice asked: "Is that something I'm only supposed to do for you, Officer David?"

Ziva caught her breath against the surprise of it. "It is not the same."

"The Hell it isn't." Gibbs said, before the click of his phone disconnecting clearly signaled the end of the debate. Ziva set her own handset down gently, as if care now could erase the harshness behind the words.

That Georgetown bomb may have been designed to splatter chunks of a Syrian war criminal, but she was the one who had been left flayed. Suddenly stripped of all the things that made this unexpected American life so good – friends, a job, trust. She had run from the embassy, reeling in terror of a future without Tony or McGee, Ducky or Abby. Of going back to being a bringer of destruction.

Then Gibbs had come, and the clatter of his feet on his own basement stairs had been a liquid flow of hope. He would hide her. Protect her. Make everything okay again.

Who was she, to deny Abby the same comfort?

Ziva slapped her hand down onto the top of her desk. Swearing at the sting and the whole terrible situation. Gibbs would protect Abby, shelter her as best he knew how. But who would be there for the next victim, or the one after that?

* * *

Gibbs pinched the bridge of his nose. Against the smell of Abby's incense and the last fading sting of anger. Talking to Ziva had made it rise up, and now it was slow to drain away. Once it had, he retrieved the phone he had thrown across the room, rueful when the bastard thing still worked.

"Ah, Jethro. I've been expecting your call." In the background was the barking of dogs and what sounded like a woman yodeling.

"You at home, Duck?" A door thudded shut and the noise cut off abruptly.

"However did you guess?"

Gibbs' lips quirked. "Oh I dunno. How's your mother?"

"Mother is doing well, but I'm guessing you did not call to inquire after her health."

Gibbs let his head loll against the back of his chair. Abby had not wanted to go back to her room after taking her pain killers, and now lay deeply asleep on the couch. Immune to voices, and apparently projectiles. Watching her made him feel his own deep weariness. "I talked with Abby. She doesn't remember much about the night."

"I can't help but see that as a mercy." Ducky said.

"Doesn't help catch him."

"No, I suppose not. However, I am not surprised. Faulty or missing memory is often part of the acute phase of Rape Trauma Syndrome."

"That like PTSD?"

"A sub-category, yes."

"Will they come back?" Gibbs asked.

Ducky sighed. "Most probably, but I cannot predict the extent. She may eventually be able to recall the whole sequence of events, or it might just be nightmares. Plus, there is the complication of a head injury."

Gibbs squeezed his eyes shut then forced them wide. "I don't know how long I can wait, Duck. There are signs this guy is some kind of serial rapist." He told Ducky about Ziva's conclusions.

There was a pause where Gibbs could clearly see Ducky tucking his chin down with a frown of deliberation. "I agree with Ziva that the cuts are troubling. We can infer from Abby's physical state that he was more concerned with power than pain. An Anger-Excitation or Sadistic rapist would make those cuts, but such men are aroused by pain and never fail to inflict great physical damage on their victims. Your man used enough force to subdue her, then appears to have moved onto what he really wanted."

Gibbs had seen enough in his career to understand what 'great physical damage' meant. He gritted his teeth. "Not my man, Doctor."

"Yes, well," Ducky's tone was apologetic "the point is Jethro, that the Power-Assertive rapist is not interested in inflicting pain, and does not take souvenirs. To him the victim is a means to an end, with no significance beyond the act."

"So why did he cut her? And where the hell did the blood go?"

"All I can give you is conjecture. He could indeed be escalating from one paradigm to another, though it is exceedingly rare. Young Anthony's idea of a calling card could also be correct."

"All right, what kind of conjecture can you give me?"

"He is most likely Caucasian, between 22 and 30 years of age. Probably athletic and considered by himself and others to be quite masculine. He will use a con of some type to lure victims into trusting him, then turn violent to keep them under control. During the attack he will use a great deal of profanity, demeaning and threatening the victim to maintain her compliance. He is both impulsive, choosing victims nearly at random, and organized enough to rarely leave physical evidence. He commits his crimes well away from familiar places, maintaining a strict buffer around his home and business. Once he is finished with his victim he simply leaves."

Gibbs listened to what amounted to a concise and well researched briefing. "You know that off the top of your head?" he asked.

"We all do what we can, Jethro." There was a little gap where Gibbs let the other man work towards whatever he still wanted to say. On the couch Abby twitched, making a nearly sub-vocal whine.

"Jethro, from what I have read this type of rapist is almost always a repeat offender."

It settled like a weight. "Damn."

They said their good-byes, and Gibbs was once again left sitting in the quiet of Abby's apartment. He stared into space, letting the rise and fall of her breathing make a white noise that blanked out thought. After a while he roused enough to consider, then decide against leaving her there for the night.

Standing next to the couch, he called her name. She woke suddenly and completely, looking up at him with taunt attention and a blank face.

"Abby?" he asked, uncertainly. She took a breath, recognition easing some of the tension around her eyes. "Time for bed."

Later he stared into the dark of her living room, thinking about the Marines he had served with in theater. How the good ones, had learned the hyper vigilance of a prey animal. Restless eyes always scanning for a danger they could not predict.

He had never thought to live in a world where Abby's eyes looked at him with that same wary suspicion.

He was still awake when she started to cry, shaking off the blankets to sit by her bed and talk about nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Original note: 
> 
> _A/N: Many apologies for not getting this update out sooner. I could blame the Internet, but it was actually the 60' seas that delayed things. If you're one of those people who thinks being seasick is connected to poor moral rectitude and personal weakness, I don't want to hear about it. Otherwise, enjoy!_


	6. Chapter 6

Tuesday for DiNozzo and McGee started exactly the same way Monday had ended; interviewing party security and support personnel. So far the guys from today knew exactly as much as the ones from yesterday. Exactly nothing.

They worked the list in a spiral pattern. McGee argued for a lineal progression, but Tony pointed out that there was a great burger place right near Third Guy's address and in the end McGee had acquiesced. Mostly because Tony was driving and he had no choice.

Now it was after lunch, and the two men were ringing the 18th doorbell of the day. When the door opened McGee felt the subtle click of something he hadn't known he'd been waiting for slide home. Because if Arron Forrest was too normal to run a Goth party, Ryan Banks made up for the debt. Scars creased his face, sinuous across the angular planes of his cheekbones, and his syllabants hissed through a split tongue. Then there were the piercings and tattoos. Lots of piercings and tattoos.

Arron Forrest was nothing but a user, taking the money of people who just wanted a couple hours of fitting in, of being the majority. Ryan Banks though, he was a full citizen of Abby's world. Maybe a ranking member. And for whatever reason, that was a comfort.

For his part, Tony leaned against the door jam, waiting for McGee to take care of the introductions.

"Mr. Banks, did you do security for a party in the warehouse district Saturday night?" he asked.

"Yeah, I was there." Wary, but not unreasonably so.

McGee brought out a picture. It showed Abby glowering against a height backdrop. Taken on a day when she insisted on knowing what being booked was like. Somehow it had become the only picture any of them could come up with on short notice. "Did you see this woman?"

Ryan took it, studying carefully. Hair, eyes, mouth. Tony watched the man's eyes flick over the picture and thought that even though he had pushed himself so far into the borderland that he was almost another species, he still looked kind.

"Hey look," he said gently, "she isn't in any trouble. She's our friend. She was at that party and some guy hurt her. We're just trying to find out who."

Ryan offered the picture back. "No, sorry. I don't remember seeing her."

When they followed up with the standard questions about seeing anything strange or suspicious, he spread his hands in a helpless gesture and smiled wryly, which was both human and gruesome. "It was a Goth party, man. Normal looking people don't get in."

They gave him a card, told him to call, turned to leave. Interview number 18: Over.

Except there was something circling uncomfortably around inside Tony's head. Howling an alert about something he was not quite bright enough to catch. Don't judge a book by its cover; it nattered, refusing to shake loose. Don't judge, don't judge, don't judge.

Well fine, he snapped peevishly at his own brain. No judging. Check. Not a book but its cover, or a Goth by his tattoos. In fact, never again would he, Anthony DiNozzo, judge a single solitary part before understanding the whole. Which of course made it all snap into place.

Goth. Abby was a Goth. This guy was a Goth. The party had probably been chocked full of Gothy hijinks. Except, Death was just one of the horsemen. A single perspective. There was also Dominance, Power, and Pain. Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll.

And Blood.

He remembered now. Way back when he first started at NCIS and thought Abby was a freak of the first order. He called her a blood sucker and she had pouted, rambling on about organization – phyla and genres and sub-groupings of people all happily romping together in the dark.

He had listened, sort of, because she could back up her punches with Gibbs, who Tony may have still been a little...wary of.

He turned back to Banks. "What do you know about vampires?" Turned out he knew enough.

They sat at his kitchen table with coffee and a little rectangular incense burner where the stick jutted out at an angle that Tony had to step on himself very hard not to make a joke about.

But he left it alone because he was enjoying how well McGee could mix reverence with envy, and a comment would have ruined it.

"Vampires," Ryan expounded, stirring a distressing amount of sugar into his coffee, "started from the Goth scene but branched off, like, maybe a decade ago. Basically, they believe their bodies are incapable of absorbing vital energy. Pranic energy, they call it. So instead they get it by feeding off someone who can. Some can drain the energy psychically, others need blood. The blood drinkers are called Sanguines."

"Latin for blood," McGee chimed in. Tony shot him a look, but Ryan nodded eagerly.

"Right. Exactly."

"Is it common for these guys to attack people in order to drink their blood?" Tony asked.

Ryan looked surprised. "No. Vampire doesn't mean crazy or sadistic, no matter what Anne Rice likes to say. Besides, it's pretty dangerous to take blood from someone you don't know. Most Sanguines' vet their donors really carefully, cause of AIDS and Hepatitis."

"Okay, so how would we go about finding an emissary into the world of night?"

"Well, it's not really my thing. I don't know anyone personally, but I've got a few friends of friends, and there's a pretty extensive blog for Sang vamps in the Metro area."

Tony flicked a finger at McGee, who obediently slid his notebook across the table. "Write down the names and URLs," he prompted. Ryan obliged, and this time when he ushered them to the door, they made it past the porch.

As they stepped onto the sidewalk Tony said, "And here I thought today wasn't going to go well."

There was that look again. Tony snapped his phone open. Gibbs was gonna love this. Sanguinarians indeed.

* * *

Gibbs had poured two cups of coffee.

His step hitched when he realized, his wrist nearly tipping to dump the extra cup out. Instead he plunked both cups down at the register. Caffeine and results. Abby believed in their fundamental connection and now her faith had made space inside him. The extra cup was the only kind of prayer he knew how to make.

Inside the lab Larkin Jones appeared to have wilted in place. He sat at the central work station, sharp creases marching up the back of his lab coat, chin resting against the heel of one hand. Only his eyes move to watch the coffee cup being nudged his way.

"Agent Gibbs," he said slowly, exhaustion apparently overcoming nervousness. He took a gulp of coffee and managed to look more alert. One long finger tapped against the cardboard cup in a tattoo of consideration. "I have test results for you."

Gibbs took a sip of his own drink, refusing to acknowledge any foreboding. Larkin seemed to take it as permission to continue. He clicked rapidly at the keyboard and the monitor split to show four separate DNA sequences.

"First the DNA. I analyzed all the uh, well, discarded butts, all of which turned out to be marijuana by the way, and hit the jackpot with four of them. Unfortunately none of those four matched the six loci I sequenced from the foreign skin cells I found in the fingernail scrapings." More keyboard rattling, and a single image popped up. This one had fewer than half the stripes as each of the previous four.

Gibbs studied the image. "What about the hair samples?"

"None of the hairs had attached follicles. I wasn't able to harvest any DNA." After a beat he added, "I'm sorry."

Yes, Gibbs thought. Sorry. He rasped a hand across the stubble on his chin. All of the razors at Abby's place had involved strips of pink flowery smelling goo above the blades. Probably benign, but he sure as hell wasn't going to let any near his face. "And the bodily fluid swabs?"

"Nothing but donor cells. This guy is either very lucky, or very careful."

"Six," Gibbs said. He thought about the extra coffee and felt a faint and ridiculous betrayal. He had brought the offering, but some trickster god had only delivered half of what he needed. Six out of the thirteen loci needed to crush reasonable doubt.

His cell phone chirped and he answered with a curt, "Yeah, Gibbs." Larkin watched as the excited jabbering on the other end ratcheted the tension in the man's shoulders tighter and tighter, until it finally broke into a bellowed: "What?"

Another short bust of words, and Gibbs snapped, "DiNozzo, I'll kill you," in a tone that was really very convincing.

Larkin decided very firmly not to ask. Ever.

* * *

The bruises in the mirror were even better this time. Growing up. Leaving the safe confines of monochromatic purple to experiment with reds and blues, even yellow. But maybe it wasn't the best idea to push the metaphor so far. Maybe it wasn't the best way to cope.

Besides, the mirror wasn't to look at bruises. She wanted to know. Inside or outside?

Inside: the ecstasy of the music, the frenetic energy, how the glory of it pressed down until she was more than herself. Like church, like praying, In Him, with Him, through Him. In the unity of the Holy Spirit, until I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together. Some fundamental part of her reaching out to brush against whatever was broken inside him.

Or outside: the ink on her skin, the tip of her head bringing him near. The curve of her throat, the twist of her hips driving him higher. Dancing making the unbearable pressure surge inside him.

Which one?

The mirror wasn't talking. It would have to be trial and error, then. Controlled experiments, one independent variable. The work of a real scientist.

She pulled her cell phone out of the pocket of her sweat pants. Put there by Ziva, who, having extracted her promise to follow a list of dont's that stopped just short of not touching the stove knobs, had gone for food. She pressed send and Ziva returned with take out Chinese and a pair of barber clippers.

She leaned against the jam of the bathroom door, hip cocked to brace the box against. "Why am I doing this?"

Abby watched her in the mirror. "Because Tony pays 80 bucks a pop to have a woman named Erin cut his hair, and nobody wants a repeat of McGee's q-tip experiment."

Ziva pushed herself upright, and returned with a chair. In the mirror her gaze was impassive. "In Islam, pilgrims going to Mecca cut their hair. To show that they are on a sacred journey."

Abby met Ziva's reflected eyes, and felt the barrier that had always been between them sublimate to a layer of smoke. She nodded,"Yeah."

Ziva thumbed on the clippers.

* * *

After Larkin's DNA death knell and Dinozzo's fantastically weird lead, it only seemed fitting to find Jennifer Shepard sitting at his desk. Legs crossed, glasses on, reading a file. He raised his eyebrows.

"Visiting the front lines, Director?"

"Jethro," she said evenly. "How is Abby?"

"How do you think?"

Her expression rebuked, and because she hadn't actually given him any reason to be a complete asshole, he added, "Hurting. Scared. Doctor's have her doped up, mostly."

Jen leaned forward in his chair, snapping the file in her hands closed. "I'd be lying if I said this case didn't concern me. Something like this could send the city into a panic."

He almost fell for it. She was so good, better than he could claim credit for. A natural talent, even in the early days when her ambition had far outweighed her caution. "Something like what?"

Infuriatingly enough, she smiled. "How about a rapist who takes his victim's blood? That factor alone will be enough to work people up." She watched his face, leaning forward with an air of amused placation. "Don't worry, none of your agents tattled. I even threatened McGee. Nothing."

He smiled without humor, and thought: Ducky. She wouldn't know then. About DiNozzo's idea. "No matching M.O. in the tri-state area. No hits on the fingerprints. DNA evidence is looking like a strike out. No reason to treat this like the work of a serial rapist."

If she noticed the lack of humor, it didn't seem to bother her. "Nevertheless, NCIS must be proactive in mitigating any risk of a repeat offense."

"I'm sorry Madam Director, I have a hard time interpreting political bullshit," Gibbs shot back with narrowed eyes.

"Then let me be perfectly clear, Agent Gibbs. I am seriously considering sharing jurisdiction for this case with the D.C. Metro Police force."

Gibbs glared. "No."

Jen stood. "Excuse me?"

"You questioning my team's ability, Jen? You think we need Metros help to crack this?" His voice snapped with anger, but her expression only hardened under it. Gibbs reminded himself, again, that her position was not exactly unearned.

"No, I'm questioning your objectivity."

Gibbs recanted his previous take on not being an asshole. "Care to explain why?"

She huffed a sarcastic noise. "Come on, Jethro. Abby herself kept information about that stalker from you because she didn't want you to beat him to death with a baseball bat."

"Yeah, and this time she came to me. Hell if I'm going to hand her over to some Metro detective who cares more about his next donut than catching the bastard who hurt her."

She looked at him with appraisal. Gibbs realized that his last sentence had not exactly helped prove his objectivity. "Jen," he said softly, "she's already talked to me. You want them digging around, making her start all over again?"

Her forward stance relaxed back a little and Gibbs knew he had won. "All right." She moved to stand across from him. "I'm willing to keep this in house for now, since Abby's attack is the only one on record with this M.O. But Jethro, if another victim turns up I'll have to alert Metro."

He met her eyes and nodded. "I'll give them the file myself."

Her eyes swept over him, and there was nothing of Jen in the long evaluation. "Deal."

As soon as she left, Tony and McGee returned to the Yard. Gibbs watched them settle back into their desks, intent on their tasks. Tim navigating through the website Ryan Banks had given them; Tony looking up the names. They both sagged under a weight Gibbs could feel in his own bones.

When Tony's gaze moved idly across the space between their desks Gibbs caught his eye and smiled a little, saying, "That was some kind of detective work, Tony." Because it was true, and because it was deserved. Definitely not because Tony's surprised smile eased some of the terrible twisting in his gut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Original note:
> 
> _A/N: Credit where credit is due. This chapter has lyrics from The Beatles I am the Walrus, and Matt Nathanson's Come on Get Higher (though Sugarland's cover is better IMO). Can you spot them?_


	7. Chapter 7

Eventually everyone left the Navy Yard. Even Gibbs, back to Abby's to relieve Ziva. Around him McGee felt the building calm and fill with a hushed sense that the outside world had ceased to exist. An oasis of desk and chair and lamp. Like some kind of Stephen King novel. Except not creepy. Peaceful.

Across his computer screen windows flicked, creatures of the night just beginning to stir and he the spider at the center.

Fingers pausing on the keys, his eyes reflexively darted to the next desk over, making double sure that Tony and his nerd sniffing abilities had not somehow reappeared. Still gone, and if there was any luck still not psychic. Tim grimaced at the paranoid reaction, arching into a stretch. Muscles popped and groaned at the movement. Too long sitting in one position. Probably time for a coffee run.

He had finished reading through the chat archives of , making sketch dossiers of all prominent users. Now he was trying to find out who they were in the real world. Capturing IP address and tracing them back to a physical location. From there he could use public records to get names.

He even found some pictures from networking sites. A-ma-zing what some people would post on the Internet.

Didn't work for everyone, of course, but it was safer. This way he only had to hack into one site, instead of tracing all the users back to individual ISP accounts. The spider analogy really wasn't that far off. He waited for each user to sign on, then pounced, wrapping them in the sticky thread of his tracer.

A script could do the same thing independently, but he didn't really have any other leads to follow and he wanted to make sure that it was done right. He couldn't risk some automated worm missing something crucial. Gibbs would kill him. Worse, the guy could get away. That was not going to happen.

On the screen a new window popped up; he forgot about the coffee.

Later, well after he had decided to sleep at his desk instead of making the trip home, the computer beeped. He looked at it with bleary non-comprehension. It beeped again, sounding reproachful. Reflexively he hit a key.

Rubbing his face he scanned over the case report that had popped up on his screen, sleepiness draining away fully and abruptly as he grabbed for the phone.

* * *

Gibbs stared into the now familiar dark of Abby's living room and wish desperately to be at home. In his basement. Working on his boat. His hands itched to be holding sandpaper. A drill. Anything that would kill the thoughts in his head.

The bastard had taken her blood. Her blood. And that was...well, for one it was creepy. Two was harder to pin down, but had something to do with belief. If Tony was right, this guy believed blood had power, and he had taken it from Abby against her will. He had harmed her twice, and now Gibbs twitched with a doubled desire to break this guy's spine across his knee.

He huffed impatiently and sat up. There was no sleep here, and no boat to numb the thoughts away. Coffee was the only thing left.

He gasped when the phone rang, hand jerking to fan coffee grounds in a broad arc across the kitchen counter as hot adrenaline made a trip hammer out of his heart.

"McGee, this better be important," he snapped into the phone. Angry at the spilled coffee, and the ache in his chest, and letting himself get so worked up over a ringing phone.

"Boss, I think I found something." McGee's voice was taunt with excitement and he didn't even try to apologize.

"Found what?" Better modulated, but still not civil. McGee continued not to notice.

"Remember that program I wrote to search through the sex offenders database? Well, after Tony's vampire theory I made a second one to search through the tri-state crime database looking for any cases with blood as a descriptor. I just got a hit. An open case from about six months ago, in Fairfax, Virgina."

Gibbs' stomach tightened. "Another rape case?"

"No, a smash and grab at the local blood bank. The guy tossed a rock through a window and walked away with 4 pints of human blood.

That was a relief. No rape meant chances were even he could argue Jen out of running to Metro. "You think it's the same guy?"

"In the 15 years since the database came online there has been exactly one incidence involving the theft of human blood. Now six months later, in the same geographic area, someone commits a similar crime. We all know how you feel about coincidences, Boss."

Gibbs allowed a half smile. "Good catch, McGee."

"But, Boss, that's not all," McGee's voice swooped into seriously excited. "The case file included a photo, pulled off the building's security camera. We have a picture of this guy."

"Are you going to tell me the file has a name next?"

"No. But I do have the photo running through facial recognition right now. Fairfax PD didn't have much luck, but we have more resources." And certainly more motivation.

"Tell DiNozzo he has some catching up to do when he gets in." Gibbs snapped the phone shut on whatever McGee's reply would have been. Hopefully he would get some sleep.

"Is something wrong?" Abby stood silhouetted in the bedroom door, her voice uneasy.

"Hey, it's late. You should be sleeping." He knew it wasn't going to be that easy, but hope always springs eternal.

"I'm all slept out. Was that McGee? Is Tony okay?"

Gibbs thought, very briefly, about asking why McGee's call and Tony's health should be linked. It might distract her. But she was already looking stubborn, and really, he didn't want to know.

"It's nothing Abbs."

She watched him, rolling her bottom lip between her teeth. He kept his face open and relaxed and her eyes narrowed. "Nothing at two in the morning?"

"Yep."

She bit her lip again and he saw how she still stood hunched over to keep from pulling on the bruises. He went back to the couch, taking one side. "Come sit down if you aren't going to go back to bed."

He tossed a blanket over her, reaching across to run a hand over the counterclockwise swirl of her cropped hair. "Not quite regs."

She smiled, small and quiet, letting his hand pull her against his shoulder, head bobbing with the rise and fall of his chest.

After a while: "Gibbs, is anything ever going to be okay again?"

He didn't try to play dumb. "Yup. Always be different, though."

Her breath warmed the fabric over his chest. "I can feel him at night. Touching me. Don't know how long I can stand that." She touched a finger to one of the cuts on her arm. "He's always there."

He folded his hand around hers, pulling it away. "Not always. One day he'll be the last thing you think about."

"When?"

He couldn't answer, and didn't try. She sighed and he knew this was how his friends had felt watching him mourn his wife and daughter. Bystanders to a pain they would give almost anything to ease.

"We're all here, Abby. McGee, Ziva, Ducky. Even Tony." He said it because it was right, and it wasn't a lie. It just wasn't the whole truth. They would all stand beside her, but she was the only one who could put herself back together. Much as he might wish otherwise, all the hard work was up to Abby.

The best he could do to make it easier was catch the bastard.

She was still after that, and he let his thoughts drift into 2 am meanders. When he looked down again he was surprised to see her eyes open, frowning down at the stitches along one arm.

"You said he had a knife, at the hospital," he prompted cautiously.

"Knife," she repeated softly, concentrating hard. He let her work at it until her eyes started glazing over, sliding into the past. He wanted her remembering, not reliving.

"You remembering something?" he asked.

"No," her voice was faint, a deep frown line between her brows. "Maybe."

Something inside him twitched, straining towards the new information. He stifled it, forcing caution. "Try Abby. Anything."

She squeezed her eyes shut, hand curling into a fist. "No, I don't..."

"Yes, you do," Gibbs told her evenly, trying to bring courage and calm into her. Fighting the tension in his own muscles. He wanted this.

Her nostrils flared as she sucked in a breath, then another that oscillated on the edge of control. The third, he knew, would be a spiral into panic.

"Just the memory," he warned her,"don't go all the way back."

She looked down at her hands, spreading each finger wide, but her voice was remote and her eyes stayed dry. This was what he wanted: to keep her balanced between memory and emotion.

"I remember he had big hands. I remember he...I...he held onto my collar. He pulled it through the buckle and I couldn't breath. He told me not to move but I kicked him and I couldn't breath and when I was on the ground he hit my head against the pavement."

She jerked under the thrall of a new realization, back curving into a bow strung with an agony past tears. "He, he kept touching my neck. At the party. When we were dancing. He wanted...h...h...he chose me because of the collar."

There was an inward twisting despair in her voice. A clear indication of blame. For being carelessness, or wearing a collar, or being the type of person who went to a Goth party in the first place. Parring that away would be the work of months, if not years. His work, and his teams', and that of the hospital recommended crisis councilors he would make sure she had an appointment with soon.

"Even if that's true Abby, even if, that doesn't make it your fault." He tried, but it was less than a whisper in the maelstrom.

Her head twisted away to watch but not see the window. "Well, I didn't exactly make it hard for him, did I Gibbs?"

"Abby," he said again, his voice deep with resonance. "It. Was. Nothing. You. Did. You couldn't have known."

"How do you know that, Gibbs! You can't possibly know that. He chose me for some reason." Her voice cracked with pleading and disbelief, and Gibbs wavered between decisions. Tell her, or not?

Beside him she breathed raggedly, fighting tears, and he sighed. There was only so long he could keep if from her, anyway. Hopefully the weirdness would help. Convince her that he had had a clear agenda she could not possibly have predicted or guarded against. That even if he had decided she was his perfect victim, it didn't make her guilty of aiding and abetting.

"Because I know what he really wanted."

It derailed her completely, brought her face back towards him, made her eyes blink and her throat heave in a swallow. "What?" she asked in a small voice, confusion and dread making a heavy weight of the single word.

"Blood," Gibbs said.

"Blood?" she asked doubtfully. And then inevitably she demanded: "What?"

So Gibbs swallowed the feeling of being trapped in a really bad B movie and explained about the missing blood in the alley, and the day Tony met Ryan Banks, and McGee's hot-off-the-presses discovery of the surveillance photo.

Into the pause his story created Abby blinked a few times. Then she said, "No coincidences." with a funny twist to her voice. And then, impossibly, she smiled. "Do you know how fantastically far fetched that is, Gibbs?" Her hands went up, arcing her emphasis into the air. "I mean, you're rules have a way of turning Occam's Razor into, like, a sledgehammer."

Gibbs shrugged. "If you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." Her eyebrows went up, and he added, "But I did tell DiNozzo that I'd kill him if he was wrong."

Even better than the smile was hearing her laugh out loud. "Sir Arthur Conan Gibbs. Poor Tony." But it couldn't last; the smile slid away, tension flowing back in. "But why...why the rest?"

"That I don't know. But whatever the reason, it came from him and not you," he told her.

She went back to the window after that the silence felt like quiet and not recrimination.

"Do you remember anything else? Anything that might help?" Gibbs finally asked.

She wrapped her arms around herself, palms pressed flat against her rib cage, and lied. "No, nothing else."

Her eyes slid away to look somewhere over his shoulder and Gibbs knew that he had not convinced her. Not all the way. That she believed if they kept going, if she told him whatever she was hold in so tightly, she might reach something he could not absolve her of.

"Okay," he said, because pushing her right now would bring nothing but tears and shaking. It would ruin that singular laugh, and he couldn't do it. "Okay."


	8. Chapter 8

Tony was rocketing up the stairs, swinging wide around the corners, blasting in and out of the huge rectangles of morning sun streaming through the windows. Things were still rotten. Terrible actually. And yet, today was shaping up to be one of the 15 Really Nice Days D.C. was alloted each year, and Tony couldn't resist the pull of it.

He came to a skidding halt at Abby's landing, catching sight of her sitting in the hallway, back against her own closed door. Her fingers moved in a wave, and he cocked his head back at her.

"Hi." Only hints of gravel remained in her voice.

"Hey Abbs." He hunkered down beside her. She would tell him, or not. No point in asking.

"I'm going for a walk."

"Okay." They watched her fingers idly twist against each other.

"Want me to go with you?"

She smiled over at him, so bright he felt his heart catch. "No."

"Okay. Mind if I sit here for a little while?"

"Sure."

He took a folded sheaf of papers out of his pocket, smoothing them against one knee. On page 3 she stood up, slowly, using the wall for leverage. He glanced up. She stood slightly hunched over, looking resolute.

On page 5 she put a hand on his bent head, fingertips squeezing a little, careful of his hair. He let himself be still under her touch, absorbing it.

When she was through the door to the stairs he stood and let himself into her apartment. Inside Gibbs was leaning against a window. Tony joined him, looking down onto the stoop of Abby's building. She appeared on the bottom step, head pivoting to carefully track the progress of a man and his dog. The pair ambled slowly, stopping to sniff the flowers, the curb, a leaf. When they were past she stepped down, pacing behind.

Dog and man went straight at the crosswalk. She turned the corner. Once she was out of sight Gibbs turned to look at him. Tony felt a sudden desire to explain himself. "She didn't want me to go with her."

"I know." There was a tight frustration in his voice.

"I'm guessing she didn't want you to go either."

"No."

She was gone for a quarter of an hour and came back holding a carton of juice. It went very precisely in the center of the table. Gibbs tented his brow and Abby beamed back at him. Her cheeks were stained scarlet and a pulse beat in her throat.

"You don't even drink orange juice."

"Proof of life. Now go to work."

He didn't move, and Abby's smile lost some of its perfect edge. "Please."

Tony drifted back towards the wall. Voyeurism was always fun, but seeing this made his insides crawl uncomfortably. Abby was perfectly capable of wheedling Gibbs. Of cajoling; jockeying; insinuating; even whining when necessary. But she never begged, and her voice never shook.

Neither noticed his retreat.

"Abby."

"Gibbs," she volleyed back, "In case you don't remember, this is my apartment. It's mine. So, please, please, go."

Gibbs frowned, glowered, then preformed the second wonder of the morning. He broke. "Alright. You'll call me?"

Abby nodded, relieved, but Gibbs had one last rally. He touched her cheek, just below the line of butterfly closures. "You sure, Abbs?"

She grabbed his wrist, leaning into his palm. Then she let go. "Yes."

Then they both looked at Tony, who wished, suddenly but with sincere passion, for the powers of teleportation. "DiNozzo!" Gibbs snapped, fitting outrage and irritation and threat of pain into three compact syllables.

Tony hopped to. "Oh, I, uh, brought the...stuff McGee wanted you to look at." He didn't know if Gibbs had told Abby about the picture, and there was no way he was going to jump the gun on that front.

Gibbs took the packet of papers, glancing them over. "He get any sleep?"

Tony nodded. "Drooling on his desk when I came in. His face was all squished up, like this." He put his palms over his cheeks, fingers against his ears. Pushing until his lips and forehead crumpled inward and his eyes were nothing but vertical slits. It made Abby smile, which was great. And Gibbs growl made it deepen which was even better. But despite the grin, her color had faded and she looked nervously towards the papers Gibbs held. She knew.

She licked her lips, outstretched hand demanding, "Let me see."

Gibbs pulled out a photo sheet, handing it to her. It showed a man's three-quarter profile, murky from low light and grainy from enlargement. "Jeeze, McGee," Abby muttered, eyes locked on the pixilated face, "use some filters wouldja."

Tony could feel the energy radiating from Gibbs. It made the hair on the back of his neck rise, humming like a high tension wire, ripe with the taunt potential of a ballistic missile just turning to plummet back to earth, a long trail of fire across the sky. Then Abby was handing the picture back, her eyes the only color in her face and the tableau shatter apart.

"Good, Abbs. Real good." Gibbs said. She nodded, collapsing bonelessly into the couch. Tony wondered if he even saw the despair that flashed across her face.

Gibbs grabbed his coat, still holding the packet, checking himself long enough to point at Abby and say, "You call." Then he was out the door, a snapped "DiNozzo!" trailing along behind him.

But Tony resisted the pull of his name, watching Abby. He hadn't seen her since that first night, when she had been as near to unconscious as nevermind. Hadn't been here to realized how the bruises had taken over until they made Abby nearly invisible underneath.

She smiled wanly."It's okay."

"Abby," he said, and knew that his time with Gibbs had not been in vain. Her name had just as much weight as the boss man could ever give it: reproach, and sorrow, and realization. It rammed into him and he remembered, oh how he remembered, the first time this had happened to him. After he had so un-wisely broken his own heart and the burning, crushing awfulness in his chest cavity made him believe he was dying.

Whatever showed on his face made her smile change into something that was for him instead of at him. "Tony," she said back softly and he felt a strange hitch in his breathing try to rise up from behind his navel. "Really, it's okay. Gibbs won't wait forever." But he was smart enough to know they were talking about the past and not the present state of abandonment. It was called subtext, and they loved to use it in the movies.

She stood up and he put his arms around her, squeezing as tight as he dared. Then he did as was told and left. Even though things were very far from fine. Grief, it was called. And there was nothing that could make it better except time, and even that was half crap anyway.

* * *

Back at the Navy Yard, Gibbs went for coffee. It felt good to have the whole team back at the office, but he needed some room to think. To sort though what they had.

Physically there was a print from Abby's collar, a few hairs, and a partial DNA sequence. It was enough to prove contact. That Jones guy occupying Abby's lab might even be able to prove that his hands were the ones that had given Abby the bruises. Knuckle span, or finger length, or some such thing.

So they could probably get all the way to assault. That was 2 years. Maximum.

Rape would get them at least 10, maybe 15. But how to prove it? Right now a first year law student could poke holes in the DNA evidence. Sequencing only 6 allele pairs was a joke. It meant the sample was hopelessly degraded, not to mention the other 136 people in the United States alone who shared the same sequence.

One out of every 12 million only sounded good until you did the math.

Gibbs crumpled the cardboard cup, tossing it into a trash barrel. They needed the guy. And then they needed a confession. And that, goddamn it, was exactly what he was going to get.

Back at the office his team collectively raised their heads at his entrance, like savanna animals sensing a coming storm. "McGee! You and David take that picture, flash it around the places that Ryan Banks told you these vampires hang out.

"On it, Boss." Tim nodded rapidly while Ziva stood to grab her coat.

"DiNozzo!" The younger man practically quivered. Gibbs let it stretch, just for a second. Even now he couldn't quite help it. "Your with me."

Tony bounced up, reaching for his gun and holster. "Where are we going?"

"Canvas blood banks."

Gibbs could see the connections sparking behind Tony's eyes. "Your thinking maybe he had some kind of steady supply?"

"Six months on half a gallon of bagged blood, to a pint from a real live girl all in one night. Pretty big jump."

Tony grunted discontentedly, shoving his service weapon onto his belt. "Why didn't I think of that?"

Gibbs stepped into the elevator. "You would have."

Tony had to jump to catch the car before the doors closed, surprise still on his face.

* * *

Ziva leaned her head against the steering wheel of her car. Just for a second. Anything can be tolerated for a moment. It ghosted through her mind, a throwback from Tironut, when the drill Sergeants had screamed it over and over to their sweating, panting, straining recruits. Back then she had adopted it as her own. Now she wondered sourly if that anything had included cowardice.

She was parked outside Abby's building. Not because Gibbs had sent her, and definitely not because Abby had asked. So why?

Maybe because going around with McGee had been awful.

They were surprisingly careful, these pierced and tattooed people. Meticulous. Each one frowning over the picture, lingering over the face, studying the background. Always just long enough to make hope swell. Then they would shake their heads. Over and over. Their head shake, and then their genuine distress when both agents deflated.

So different from the brief glances and irritated denials Ziva had come to expect from inconvenienced Americans. Somewhere along the way she had started to wonder if all that metal and ink was somehow necessary. Camouflage coloration and a protective exoskeleton that helped ward their heightened sensitivity from ridicule and intrusion.

Well, if it was, Abby's had failed. Someone had realized her bright colors were only a mimicry of poison and the metal was nothing but a thin shield.

Ziva picked her head up and shook it sharply. All of this was a fancy way of saying that Abby needed a friend. And here Ziva was, full of a desire to be that person. But only if she scraped up enough courage to get out of the car.

Pushing the bell required a bracing heave of air, and waiting for the door to buzz open was an eternity, but after that the option to run away was gone and it became easier. Inside, Ziva found Abby laying on the floor, legs up on the bed, watching the ceiling. The seal-sleek roundness of her head was still startling.

She hovered in the bedroom doorway, uncertain and feeling frozen, until the tips of Abby's fingers twitched, almost invisibly faint. Deciding to interpret it as encouragement, Ziva moved to sit with her back against the side of th bed, sliding to the floor next to Abby. Eventually the other woman spoke. "Being in bed makes my back hurt. Most people hold my hand. Is that an Israeli thing?"

There were times when Ziva could hold onto the thread of Abby's thought train for up to two minutes. Clearly today was not going to be one of those record breakers. "Is what an Israeli thing?"

"Not holding hands."

Well, obviously. "No, I do not think so."

"Huh."

They lapsed back into silence. Ziva watching the wall; Abby abandoning looking at her in favor of returning to the ceiling.

Ziva had seen strangers, even co-workers come to the wrong conclusion about Abby. They saw the clothes she wore, and assumed that anyone who so enthusiastically embraced darkness must be bent on self destruction. They could be stunningly unsubtle, these people. Always trying to catch a glimpse at the underside of her wrists.

But the ones who truly saw Abby understood that she had a better grasp on being joyously alive than almost anyone. She embraced being a Goth with the same fervor given to all things she deemed worthy, while she bounced, vibrated, and unexpectedly hugged her way through a hyper-kinetic landscape.

Now she was still.

For a quarter of an hour Abby had been perfect still, hands limp at her side while she watched a blank ceiling. Ziva knew that if people wanted to touch Abby, wanted to grab on and hold, it was through some hope that their own electrical heartbeat could jolt her back to what she had been not so long ago.

Ziva reached over and, very precisely, laced her own fingers through Abby's, pulling their linked hands into her lap.

Abby cut her eyes towards her companion. "Have you been thinking about that the whole time?"

"In an eggshell, yes."

Her lips curled up, just at the edges. "Nutshell."

Tentatively, Ziva smiled at her, pleased with the small moment she had created. Abby smiled back, and this time when her eyes drifted back towards the ceiling it did not have the exclusion of before.

For a while Ziva simply sat, holding hands and listening to the quiet drone of the bedroom, until Abby confided: "I followed him into the alley," to the ceiling. "I remember, he was beautiful, so I followed him."

Ziva looked over and saw the frayed ends of Abby's psyche. "It is not your fault, Abby."

Abby rolled her eyes towards Ziva. "I know, but if you left your door unlocked and someone stole your things, don't you think you might be an eensy bit stupid for having made it so easy?"

"Abby, this is not your fault." Ziva repeated.

"I know, okay. I didn't cause it. But there sure are some things I could have done to prevent it. Except I didn't do any of them. Not one."

Ziva traced the scabs that had finally formed over the missing skin on Abby's knuckles. "You did not make it easy, Abby. You fought, and even if he was physically strong enough to overpower you, that does not mean you gave in. We know it, and someday you will to. Until then, we will hold your hand, to help you across the gap."

Abby looked surprised. "Deep, Ziva."

"You will believe it, someday." Ziva said, undeterred by the flash of tension across Abby's face. Most things worth doing took courage. And time.


	9. Chapter 9

Six place. Nearly thirty people. Ninety head shakes.

Understand: it was only an estimate. He hadn't start counting until the third place. But an average of three-shakes-per would account for the two and four timers. Now, at lucky number seven he had started to wonder if the number of repetitions was habitual, or situational, when a woman (brunette, good face, great legs) said: "Sure, that's Eric."

Gibbs' look was suddenly sharper. "He have a last name?"

She put her clipboard aside with a raised eyebrow. "Can I ask what this is about?"

"The man in the picture is suspected of breaking into the Fairfax Red Cross blood bank and stealing four pints of blood. We'd like to find him, ask him a few questions."

The woman's face tightened and she stood up. "I bet. Well, his name is Eric Caswell. He used to volunteer here, pretty regular, but I haven't seen him in a while." She moved towards a battered metal desk. Both men trailed after her, standing by as she located and rifled through a thick manila folder.

"There a reason he stopped coming?" Gibbs asked.

"He got busted down to floor sweeper after he made too many mistakes. He was always filling out the forms wrong, screwing up the inventory." She made a wry face. "Sounds bad, I know. But we spend all out time here keeping an eye on the needles. It never occurred to anyone to watch the blood." She handed a sheet to Gibbs. "Here's his information."

Gibbs glanced over the sheet. "Started about five months ago."

Tony grunted. "There's the missing time, Boss."

Gibbs folded the sheet in half, trading it for a business card. "Agent DiNozzo will take your contact info. If you think of anything more, call me. Phone number's on the card." The woman took the card and Gibbs moved towards the door, the edges of his coat flaring out behind him.

She moved her eyes to Tony, full of faint amusement and obvious interest. "Are all Navy cops so direct?"

Usually playing along was instinctual as breathing, but tonight Tony let it slide away, eying the door. They had a name now, and sex was not what he wanted to be hunting. She gave his obvious distraction a sardonic look, handing over a business card and answering her own question. "I guess that would be a yes."

He gave her a smile, because hey, he was still alive, then strode out after Gibbs. The other man was already on the phone by the time Tony made it to the car, squealing out of the parking lot before he could get his door closed.

* * *

"No." McGee crooned to his computer. "No, no, no."

"No what?"

It was startling, the voice. His head whipped towards it, pulling at least 2 gees. Standing in front of his desk, no announcement necessary, were Team Leader and Senior Investigator.

Tim's self preservation filter kicked in, and he blinked up at the two men mutely. Gibbs' eyes narrowed to antagonistic slits. His forehead lowered. He leaned in across the desk. "No, what, McGee?"

Over Gibbs' shoulder, Tony's face filled with a frat boy's delight of someone else's imminent doom. McGee's stomach sank under the certainty of his impending entertainment. Gibbs was about to be legendarily pissed. Pissed enough to hang, draw, and quarter the messenger.

Gibb's brow line became a thunderhead and McGee licked his lips."I just finished pulling Caswell's DMV photo." He hit a key and the plasma above his head filled with the license photo of a stiffly smiling blond man. "Same social, same address, different photo." McGee looked up. "It's not him, Boss."

Gibbs stared at the plasma screen. Hunter poised. Sniper still. The fist, when it came, was completely anticipated and completely surprising, crashing onto his desk with a rattle of pencils and keyboard.

Despite himself Tim cringed back. Not too bad, not so much, but Gibbs clearly saw it. The disgust was clear in his eyes. He kicked the front panel of the desk, swore, to McGee or at him, and stormed off.

The word useless fluttered behind him.

"Probie." Tony murmured, earlier delight drained away and sympathy in his eyes. It felt bitter as gall.

Tim looked at his desk. "Don't Tony. Just don't."

To his credit, Tony obeyed. Sitting at his desk, typing and occasionally looking towards McGee, but not saying a word. But McGee was too busy staring at the man who was and was not Eric Caswell to feel any victory.

* * *

Gibbs went home, feeling the hum of tires on asphalt, sandpaper on wood, bourbon on an empty stomach. Sensation in place of thinking. Because Gibbs did not want to think.

Not about how he had humiliated McGee. Or the hot satisfaction of seeing him crumple. Definitely not the image of Abby's face, swollen and closed off as he pressed her to remember what her spirit wanted to forget.

So he sanded. The block stroking across a rib, down the keel, across a rib. Rasping away the rage, the memory, the image. Over and over, until clattering steps broke the rhythm. Ducky, bearing sandwiches.

They chewed in silence, leaning against the work bench and washing the food down with sips of liquor. When they were done Ducky patted Gibbs on the shoulder a couple times before retreating back up the stairs. Overhead the front door snicked shut. Gibbs picked up the sanding block.

* * *

Across town, McGee looked up from his dull misery and clicked a few letters on his keyboard. Then he asked: "Busted down from what?"

Tony looked across the dimly lit space. "Huh?"

"The fake Eric Caswell." McGee clarified impatiently. "He got busted down to scut work, but what did he do before?"

Tony skated a business card towards McGee. "Let's find out."

McGee gave Tony a raised eyebrow glance when 'Shane' on the card turned out to be a woman, but by the time he rang off it had been replaced by a look of hard intensity. He stabbed a finger down on the disconnect switch, saying, "He was a phlebotomist. I have to talk to Ducky," and was punching in new numbers before Tony could ask what the hell a phlebotomist was.

The conversation with Ducky was clipped and staccato, ending with a crash of the headset and McGee ripping his jacket from the chair. "You coming?"

Tony decided now was not a good time for questions. He gestured something that could have been courtly, if the court in question was very dimly lit. "Lay on, McDuff."

The came to a stop in a hospital parking lot, where McGee proceeded to sit, watching the sodium vapor lights and making no move to get out. Very curious, after the all fired rush to get here. Inside the car, Tony knew this was the opening of A Talk. The kind he never had to suffer through at Philly or Peoria. Mostly because he had never stuck around long enough to care.

"Probie. You're not useless."

"I know, Tony. But thanks." No moving, more staring.

"Okay." They sat. "Then why are we still sitting in the car?"

McGee's head bent to watch his own hands slip up and down the plastic steering wheel. "Because I can't get over it, you know. How it must have been. Her screaming and him grabbing." McGee flicked his eyes to Tony, asking for a benediction Tony knew none of them could give. "You can't be that drunk. I mean, there's no mistaking that. He had to hit her. Choke her. Hold her down."

Tony looked at McGee's profile and felt the press of the early dark, saying quietly. "Yeah. He knew."

McGee took a sharp breath at the confirmation, letting it out slowly. "I think maybe doing something like that to a woman, to anyone, I think maybe that makes you something less than human."

Tony kept his hands perfectly flat against his knees, spine straight, eyes forward, trying through force of will to keep the world in alignment. Because of all the people he could have predicted ghosting over that thin gray vigilante line, Timothy McGee had never been near the top of the list. "A jury might not see it that way."

McGee burst the little bubble of unreality that skimmed the inside of the car by jerking his door open. "A phlebotomist is someone who specializes in drawing blood. According to Ducky, it's not a skill you can fake your way into. Eric Caswell went though The University of Maryland's training program at this hospital. Maybe our guy met him here, got his social and address. I figured we could flash the picture around."

Tony yanked his own door open, happy to be out. "We've solved cases on less. Not much less, granted. But some. Let's flash away."

Twenty minutes later, after a dark haired and lab-coated woman had pursed her lips at the picture and said, "That's Jack," in a way that implied it might be better for Jack to avoided her, Tony found himself sitting in the hospital cafeteria, drinking bad coffee and wishing he had bought a lotto ticket.

The jackpot was up to 3.8 million, and tonight was clearly the night for impossible things.

When she came, it was at full sea speed, striding down the ramp into the sunken dining area with her lab coat trailing behind her like an avengers cape. She swirled into a chair, lounging back to take in both men with something like relish. A movie goer, anticipating a good show.

"What," she asked, "has Jack Ryker done now?"

"Jack Ryker?" Tony countered.

The nail of her pointer finger made three rapid taps against the table top as she looked him over with unsubtle appraisal. "The man in the picture you showed me. His name is Jack Ryker. He took a couple advanced training classes here, about a year and a half ago."

"Do you know where he is now?" McGee asked with imperfectly concealed eagerness.

"No."

"When was the last time you had any contact with him?"

Her dark red lips curved into a smile of sardonic mirth. "March 21st of last year."

"That's an awfully precise date. What happen on the 21st of March?" Tony picked up the tag teaming.

"If I give you guys the story, are you going to tell me what this is about?"

McGee plowed ahead. "How well did you know Mr. Ryker?"

She cradled her chin, fingers tapping against her cheek, considering. "We dated, if you could call it that. Mostly it was about sex. He was into scenes, roll playing, that kind of stuff. I wanted to see what it was about. Turns out it's pretty boring. So was he."

"So you broke it off?" Tony asked.

"Yes."

"Can we assume that he took the rejection badly, Miss...?" He smiled into the pause, making sure the canines showed.

Her eyes flicked up his body. "Maria Pursima de Jesus. And yes, he reacted badly. Went completely psycho. Pushed me back onto the bed, handcuffed my hands around the post. Pulled out some kind of knife and told me not to move."

She looked at their suddenly pinched faces. "Don't worry. The idiot used a crappy pair of plastic cuffs. I broke them." She smiled and it was full of challenge, "Then I broke him."

"Uh, broke?" McGee asked.

Her hand came out from under her chin and clenched into a squeezing, twisting vise. "Ruptured his left testicle."

Both men cringed back simultaneously. "Ruptured!?" McGee squawked.

"Ruptured," she affirmed with a kind of piratical glee. "Pitched him out the front door; haven't seen him since. But I can give you his enrollment form. Has social security, phone number, and address on it."

Tony cleared his throat, managing to un-curl nearly all the way. "Please," he said. Respectfully.

"Anything to ruin his day. But you never told me what he did."

"He's wanted for questioning in connection to a rape case." McGee said flatly.

It took the wind out of her sails. "Damn," she cursed softly, face falling. "I thought...I guess I thought he was too much of an idiot to actually pull anything off." There was a little silence, and she blew some air out. "Guess I was wrong."

McGee nudged the conversation back on track. "Catching him is a good way to keep it from happing again. Your information could really help us."

She stood. "Right. Okay. Well, come on." They returned to a small reception area that was completely filled by a computer, printer, and three adults. When the forms were printed she handed them over. "The woman he hurt, is she going to be okay?"

Tony remembered the morning at Abby's apartment, shrugging, "It takes time, right?"

Something that looked very much like guilt flashed over her face. "Yeah."

Outside the hospital, Tony snapped his cell phone open, but McGee grabbed it away before he could dial.

"No. We check this out first. I'm not gonna go through a repeat of giving Gibbs bad news."

Tony wrestled the phone back, taking the keys for good measure. "Good point, Probie, but I'm driving."

Back at the Yard, the search took less than five minutes. On the large plasma screen that dominated the darkened bullpen the two men stared at a picture. The license photo of Jacob Paxton Ryker - Height, weight, eye color, hair color, and address. A predator, neatly parsed.

McGee looked at it and felt vaguely disappointed. It should be more clean cut, the difference between the evil and the good. If Tony felt the same way, he hid it perfectly behind a satisfied smile. "You and I should go gambling sometime McLucky. But first we should call Gibbs."

Tim held his phone out to the grinning man, glad to hand the triumph off. "You call him."


	10. Chapter 10

The next set of footsteps across his ceiling were lighter, lithe and smooth. Gibbs listened to them and wished that he had locked the damn door.

"Gibbs?" she called from the doorway.

"Ziva," he answered back. She seemed to take it as permission to come down the stairs.

"I just came from Abby's."

"Uh huh."

Ziva shifted, uncomfortable at having to lead this conversation. "She told me she remembers following her attacker into the alley."

The sanding block rasped to a stop. Gibbs looked directly at the small patch of boat in front of his face. He wanted to press his nose against the smoothness. Let the sharp scent of the wood help keep a grasp on the calm that had finally come.

"She thinks it is her fault. For being careless." Ziva shifted onto the balls of her feet, mass balanced over her center of gravity. She was nervous about what she was about to say. "Gibbs. Please. Let Metro talk to her. Do not make it worse by forcing her to tell you every mistake she made that evening."

Gibbs' voice was strangled, throat tight from all the things in Abby's mind that he could not shake loose. "You think I blame Abby for any of this?"

"No. Of course not. But Gibbs, this is not about what you think. It is about what Abby thinks. And you must admit she might be more comfortable talking to someone who's opinion does not matter to her so much."

He expected defensiveness, and this rational compassion was upsetting. "Must I?" Clipped and cold, designed to force her back towards her typical vehemence. Instead she just shifted again, refusing to be goaded. The failed tactic made him realize how committed she was to swaying him. Ziva liked few things better than pitting her will against another, but here she was, refusing to allow either of them the distraction of an argument.

All he could do now was throw her out, and that would only reinforce her position by proving he had no actual rebuttal. His original argument with Jen, about not forcing Abby to tell her story twice was no longer viable. Not after she had admitted to remembering more.

Ziva's strategy drove past the immediate denial that Abby was his. No one, not even a Metro cop was going to challenge his connection to Abby. So, if that was true, why did it matter so much if she told someone else?

Because, he realized, he wanted it to be a tautology. Abby hid from her friends and family the things she was ashamed of. Therefore if she talked to him, she wouldn't be ashamed. Wishful thinking. An unconscious pipe dream that was never going to come true.

Behind him Ziva drew a breath, ready to begin whatever sweet and reasonable speech she had come prepared with. He cut her off by turning to lean his shoulder against the curve of the hull.

"Maybe Abby should decide."

She looked at him with her mouth open. "What?"

"Abby should decide who she wants to talk to."

Ziva closed her mouth with a click, her sharp stare clearly waffling between surprise and anger. Gibbs almost smiled.

He went back to his boat, sanding away any hint of roughness with a lazier stroke that lacked the heat of before. This time when the phone rang his hissed out breath lacked conviction. His muscles burned, and the bourbon had been gone since before Ziva. Maybe it was time to stop anyway.

The caller display was too blurred to read, but he wasn't surprised to hear Tony's voice after his gruff greeting. It was the words that sent the white static fizzing through his head.

"Okay. You and McGee go to the house. Passive surveillance only, see if you can sight him." It would give him enough time to visit Larkin Jones, press him for more. Something that would force this guy into a confession.

He was done working on the boat, but sleep sure as hell wasn't going to come now. If he showered and dressed now, he would be at the Yard less than an hour ahead of the early morning commuters.

When he came back down, barefoot and belt hanging unbuckled to tuck in his undershirt, it wasn't too surprising to find Abby sitting on his couch.

"Abbs," he said, "it's early."

She tracked him carefully across the room. "Or late. Depending on how you look at it."

He fixed his belt, pulled on his top shirt. He had no idea why she was here. Finally he said, "Ziva was here. She said you two talked."

He meant it as an opening, an offer to get her whoever she wanted to talk to, but her eyes slid away from him, teeth sinking into her lower lip and her shoulders rounding against his voice. Mute. It pushed a stab of frustration through him. Why was she stonewalling him? "Abby," he said reproachfully.

"I got scared," she blurted out into her lap. "In my apartment. I got scared, and called Tony, and he said he could talk on the phone, but couldn't come over because he and Ziva and McGee would be busy for the rest of the night." She looked up at him. "That means you found him, right? They're busy because you guys found him?"

She watched him, and even through the best in the country had taught him how to keep his thoughts to himself, the color began draining out of her face. There was no point in lying.

"Yeah, we found him."

"But I didn't want you to." She nearly whispered it, and Gibbs knew it was the truth behind the evasion.

"Why, Abbs?" He tried, but he couldn't fully keep the hurt from his voice.

Abby felt it spike through her. She ran the back of a hand under her nose, feeling the inevitability of the next while pressing down. Heavy and irreversible as the capstone of a pyramid. "Because I...", she started, but the words wouldn't come.

Defending his feudal property was Gibbs honor and his natural law. A grass knight, he would force her predator to the ground and then haul him, naked and shaking, up to the gallows. An extravagant display of tailored justice designed to make her feel safe again. But the drop would be for Gibbs alone. Revenge for harming something he had laid claim to.

Except it didn't work like that. The solitary noose had been edged out by 12 thin strands of opinion. It would be her testimony that would lay each one across his neck; her public recitation that would make the jurors pull each one tight. Only they never would. Then never would. Not with her clothes, and her parties, and how she had followedhim into the alley.

And if she told Gibbs this: that she couldn't stand up and tell complete strangers all the things that had been taken from her? Well, then he would hug her tight, kiss the side of her head, and say okay. Then he would wait for a late night. A dark place. One less bad man in the world. He would never tell and she would always know.

Either way she would hurt. So it was better, far better if he was never found at all. Except it was too late for that.

Even in the absence of words, Gibbs was far from being a stupid man; he understood a least part of it. He crouched down until their faces were level. "If you help me Abbs, I can press him for a full confession. Trip him up with some detail so that he knows we've got him cold. No court. No jury. But I can't do any of that unless you tell me what happened that night."

His face had regained compassion and sincerity. She looked over his shoulder, eyes wide to keep the tears from spilling over, and said nothing. He sighed,"Abby, if it would be easier, you could make your statement to Ziva. Or a female detective from Metro. It doesn't have to be me."

The monumental fight, and the larger concession hiding behind his statement was clearly visible in the line of Gibbs body. Everyone knew he didn't share, but here he was offering just that. She was grateful, but it still couldn't make the words form. She shook her head, small and tight. "I can't."

He ran a finger under her un-bruised eye. "Can't, or won't?"

The despair rose up, so hard she had to clench her fists against it, until a line of blood uncurled lazily from her fist and made fat drops on her pants. The air felt rarefied and she sucked hard trying to get enough. Gibbs' fingers prised against her own, his lips making words she couldn't hear over the rising buzz in her ears.

"Stop," she said.

He didn't.

"Stop." Again. This time his fingers stilled, his face suddenly wary, but it was too late. The room was fading into a buzzing darkness and Gibbs was pressing a hand against her neck, forcing her head down.

The pressure on her neck stayed until the static faded out. Then he pulled her against his shoulder and she rode limply against the rise and fall of his chest while his hand soothed against the column of her spine. Eventually there was his shower, and his bed. Then something incredibly alcoholic and a crashing wave of sleep.

* * *

Gibbs watched Abby sleep for a little while, listening to the quiet hush of his mid-morning house. It wasn't a normal time for him to be here, and everything felt strangely light and airy. The atmosphere was a bad match for his mood, and when he finally returned to the Navy Yard, the site of her lab pulled the vacuum in his stomach a little tighter.

Things had changed position subtly. It no longer looked like hers and he felt the absence keenly. He had even had his head shrunk enough to understand it wasn't her physical presence he missed. He wanted to see the woman who had existed before last Saturday night.

Larkin greeted him as he strode through the lab door, but Gibbs skipped the preliminaries, slapping a picture down on the counter. "I need a way to match this guy with Abby's attacker."

"Who is he?"

"Would it help?"

Larkin let a fingertip touch the photo. "No. Sorry. I can run the standard DNA comparison, but we both know with only 6 alleles it won't do you much good. I could also match the sample hairs to ones harvested from him, prove that composition-wise they are the same. And of course, there are the fingerprint from the collar. None of it will equal the weight of a full DNA match, but with everything put together it might be enough to convince a judge."

Evidence. Court. Gibbs slapped the counter top. "Not good enough. I need something airtight."

Drawn up to his full height, Larkin let a long moment stretch by. "Agent Gibbs. I'm good at what I do. Maybe not a genius, but I'm careful and I'm thorough, and I can assure you that I have not overlooked or neglected anything. So barging in here and banging things around like a child is not going to make forensics appear out of thin air. I suggest you find another alternative."

Gibbs lifted his stinging palm from the lab bench, the man in front of him undergoing a rapid reassessment. Skinny, yes, and fragile looking. But obviously a mistake to think the physical traits extended to the personal ones. And when exactly, in his decade long observation of Abby, had he decided lab geeks were meek?

"Not many people around here who talk to me like that."

Larkin shrugged. "I'm a temp. At the end of this I scuttle back to the FBI. What's the worst you could do? Yell at me?"

"Seems to work for most people." Gibbs said, mostly for his own benefit.

Larkin waved his hands over himself elaborately, with all the associated juddering and the not-too-faint suggestion of clacking bones. "As you can see Agent Gibbs, I am somewhat outside one sigma on the normalcy curve." He peered at the irate agent with overly correct solemnity – sympathy for the obviously slow.

Gibbs gave into a small smile. "A forensics geek that can't be intimidated. Bet your helpful in court."

Larkin smiled with a gracious self modesty. "My fierceness is legendary."

Gibbs huffed something that hovered between acknowledgment and amusement. "All right. You guarantee you can get me results from matching hairs?"

Larkin nodded, "Yes. You bring me a sample, I can analyze it for similar amounts of pigment, coarseness, trace elements, etcetera and so on. Like I said, DNA is the gold standard, but the courts still accept composition matching as evidence."

Gibbs sighed at the word 'court'. Matching hairs. Fingerprints. It was what they had. Maybe it would be enough to pressure him into a confession.

He snapped his phone open.


	11. Chapter 11

As far as stakeouts went, three was definitely a crowd.

Tony had tried pulling rank when Ziva announced that she was coming along; McGee has pointed out how small and uncomfortable the backseat was; but Ziva had, in her threatening way, held up a pinky finger, and even though neither of them was completely sure she could kill both of them at once, they weren't going to risk being the one that didn't get away.

So now they sat in the driving rain and the morning commute, playing rock-paper-scissors to see who had to make the next coffee run. And despite the rising level of violence between the front and back seats, Tim thought there was a certain coziness in the company and the drum of the rain.

Then Jack Ryker opened his front door, and he remembered that Kate had died on a day like this.

Their quarry balked at the force of the rain, then pulled up his jacket hood and dove into the weather.

"Hey," Tim whispered. And when there was no response: "Hey!"

"What!" Tony barked, busy trying to regain possession of the hand Ziva was using in a genuine attempt to leverage his shoulder out its socket. "If you're not man enough to hit her for me, at least shut up for a while, McGoo."

McGee, possessed by a sudden and foreign spirit, popped his hand against the back of Tony's head. A hollow thwap that made all three freeze, eyes round in the elastic stretch of seconds. McGee's mouth dropped into a frozen 'O' of horror, but Ziva sagged back, letting go of Tony's wrist while a smile twitched along the outside edges of her lips.

Tony used the new freedom to pull his face from between the steering wheel spokes. "You dare." he hissed, malice in his slitted eyes, but McGee had already decided through was the only way out. He grabbed the other man's face, squishing his cheeks into a fish mouth, forcibly realigning his line of sight while cutting off any more words.

"Jack Ryker. Jack Fucking Ryker you douchbag."

Tony jerked and squinted. "U thure?"

"Yes, I'm goddamn sure."

Tony yanked his face out of McGee's grip, palming his jaw. "Okay. Okay. Calm down Probie-wan Kenobi. I'll call Gibbs." But even as he dug down into his hip pocket, his phone began to vibrate and chatter. He pulled it out, looking at the caller ID.

"Again with the creepy physicness," he muttered, flipping it open. "Boss! I was just about to call you. We've got a visual on Ryker." He listened, then nodded sharply, yanking his door open.

"Lets go."

They waited for him at the corner, zipping him into a neatly laid pocket. Tony herding him close towards the building, forcing him to take the corner tight. Ziva making him stop short. McGee boxing in the side.

His eyes showed alarm, but not outright fear. Even hunched up against the rain he was tall and compactly muscled. Probably very unused to being intimidated. Ziva gave a muted flash of her badge, melting the sharpest edge of his unease.

"Jack Ryker. You need to come with us," she said.

His eyes flicked warily between them. "Why?"

Tony caught and held his eyes, letting his own height and strength be a challenge. "Because you did a bad thing Jackie, and now you have to go to time out."

Back against a literal wall, their cornered mouse flipped rapidly through all the possible responses. Tony watched as decision click behind his eyes. A dumb one.

He was agile for a muscular guy, surprisingly fast, trying to bowl over what he thought was the weakest link in their picket. Except Ziva didn't bowl. She let her weapon fall, grabbing fistfuls of his clothing and yelling something brutishly angry in Hebrew. He came down on top of her, cut off the words in a woof of air being driven out of her lungs. She writhed, and Ryker scrambled up.

Tony bellowed his own abrupt rage, pulling his weapon fully out of its holster and stretching his legs in pursuit. He should have made it first. Physics were on his side – closer, longer legs. But McGee caught up first, sticking out a foot to trip Ryker, bringing his weapon around to point at the lurching man's back. "Stop! Hands on your head. Or I'll shoot!" he screamed.

Ryker humped awkwardly, face stretched into a rictus of effort as he used two feet and a hand to crab away. Tony saw the other hand under his jacket, frantically searching for something.

"Weapon, McGee!" he screamed, putting the full force a severely taxed lung capacity behind it. "He's got a weapon!"

McGee heard, lashing out with a foot to kick Ryker down on all fours. Too late though. Ryker had found what he wanted, something sliver glinting in his hand as he twisted to launch himself back towards McGee's knees. The agent's weapon went flying as they fell together, a roiling mass of barred teeth and deep grunts. Ryker seemed to expect his greater weight to overwhelm McGee, but for the second time in less than a minute he was surprised.

Tony could have told him. Could have explained it easily. For someone with so many muscles, Ryker had no understanding of the rules of play. The game always went to the one who wanted it more.

McGee flipped Ryker, slamming his wrist against the ground and sending the slim little blade spinning. Straddled his opponent's waist, McGee brought his arm against Ryker's throat as the man went limp under the pressure.

McGee blew hard, breath hissing around clenched teeth. "You are under arrest asshole."

* * *

Gibbs stood in front of the one way mirror, looking into the interrogation room. Occasionally he sipped from a cup that had cooled to lukewarm a while ago. On the other side of the mirror sat a man wearing a pair of NCIS coveralls, hair still damp, hunched up from chill and from nerves.

The door to the observation room snicked open, making the displaced air swirl. He held a long swallow as the woman moved up beside him, watching her faint reflection in the glass. "Jen."

"Jethro," she acknowledged, "you've been in here a long time."

He didn't answer. If it was upsetting to have her concern brushed off so completely, she didn't show it.

"This the guy?"

"Yup."

"Abby ID'd him?"

"Nope."

"But he's the one."

"He's the one," Gibbs confirmed.

She looked at him and her smile held a deep, and deeply wry, affection. "Your gut?"

He glanced over, and his expression held a certain measure of her own. Then it faded and he was again looking at the man fidgeting in the other room. "Gonna need a full confession on this one, Jen. Last thing Abby needs is having to testify against this guy."

If it stung – having his affection but not his concern, she didn't let that show either. The carpet absorbed her footfalls, the door did not squeak, but her retreat was not as silent as her approach. "You're one of the agencies best interrogators, Agent Gibbs. I have every faith you can push him towards a full confession."

Behind her back, Gibbs did not turn from his study of the man in the other room, but if she wanted the last word, she was disappointed. Through the closing he said, "One of, Director?"

If she had any reply, Gibbs didn't hear it. He let himself finish the coffee before turning away from the mirror. Then another moment in front of the interrogation room door. A second to steel himself. Make himself steel. Anger had no place in an interrogation room.

Ryker came on point when he opened the door, head snapping towards him like a sight hound. "Are you here to tell me what this is about? Because last time I checked, I wasn't in the Navy."

In silence Gibbs moved across the room, sat, slid a copy of the surveillance photo across the table. "Do you know what this is?"

Ryker stared at the muddy and pixilated picture. When he looked up some of the challenge had melted out of his eyes, but he shook his head. "No."

"It's a photo of you stealing 4 pints of blood from the Fairfaxblood bank." He pulled it away. "Not a great picture. Half a year old, too. But there's no statue of limitations on trafficking in human organs."

Ryker sucked in a deep breath, then another, visibly gaining control of himself. "You're making a serious mistake here. I didn't sell any blood." He managed to say it calmly, with just an edge of anger. A reasonable citizen, pushed just a little too far.

Gibbs raised his eyebrows. "Oh, I know."

Ryker paused, caught between confusion and anger. Gibbs let the hammer fall. "My superiors won't believe me. They want a big bust, good publicity, promotions. They get angry when a working stiff butts in, but me, I'm pretty sure you drank it."

Ryker went rigid, nostrils flaring with his rapid and shallow breaths. But if Gibbs was hoping for a first round knock out, he was disappointed. The man across the table was pale with fury, not fear.

"You're goddamn crazy," Ryker spat.

Gibbs went on as if he hadn't said anything. "We know you stole those 4 pints of blood from the Fairfax blood bank. We know you had a regular supply from the Alexandriablood bank. But when my agents looked, they couldn't find anything. Nothing in your car. Nothing in your apartment. The higher ups say you must be selling it. But the funny thing is, we can't find any money either. No vacations, no porches, no numbered accounts." Gibbs shrugged, "Criminal investigation 101."

If the news that agents had riffled through his life bothered Ryker, he hid it completely. In fact he leaned back, stretching his long legs out. "Agent Gibbs," he said, "are you ever going to tell me what this is really about?"

Gibbs looked surprised. "I've already told you."

Ryker batted it away contemptuously. "Come on. You said yourself there is no evidence I'm selling blood on the black market. As for the stealing; there's no evidence of that either."

Gibbs pulled his head back in a gesture of skeptical surprise. "There isn't?"

"No. Because I didn't do it." Beneath the easy tone, there was something Gibbs had heard before. Threat. A bully hinting at consequences. Ryker thought the man across from him could be intimidated into dropping this.

Gibbs leaned back in his own chair, giving off a great air of calculation. After a long moment, he said, "You're right. The blood doesn't make you anything but a side show freak."

Behind the mirror Tony and Ziva, who had taken up position after Gibbs left, exchanged a look. You're right wasn't something Gibbs said to them, let alone to someone he was interrogating. And after what this guy did to Abby...?

"This should be interesting," Tony muttered.

Across the mirror Gibbs pulled out another picture, laying it over the surveillance photo. This one was glossy with contrast. A full color spectrum of Abby's bruised face. "This is about her."

A flash of anger had spasmed across Ryker's face at being called a sideshow freak, but he tamped it down, bending to look at the picture. He gave off no shock of recognition, but when he looked back up his smile was one of a cat who ate the canary. "She musta done something, to get someone that angry at her."

Gibbs made a grab for the reins of his temper, pulling up at the last second. He stayed in his chair, but Ryker still saw the twitch. Understanding flooded his face. "I get it," he said. "You know this chick." He leaned forward, a one sided conspiracy. "You doin' her? Is that what this is about?"

Gibbs had regained mastery of himself. "Last Saturday night someone took this woman into an alley for what she thought would be a fun game of grab ass. Instead the man beat her, sliced open her arms, and apparently fled the premises with a good amount of her blood." His smile showed the thinnest edge of his contempt.

Ryker grinned back expansively. Either he was relieved there had been no mention of rape, or he just enjoyed making people uncomfortable. Not that the second precluded the first.

"So, because I was near a blood bank that happened to be robbed half a year ago, you think I did it? That's pretty circumstantial, Agent Gibbs."

"I know you did it," Gibbs said mildly.

"Yeah? How'er you gonna prove this one? With butterflies and lollipops?"

"No," Gibbs said, "with DNA."

"You want me to give you a DNA sample?" If it made Ryker nervous, he did not betray it. Which meant he was either a very good actor, or he completely believed he would escape this.

"Volunteer," Gibbs corrected. He was voting on the second option.

"Why?"

"For comparison. Blood was found under the victim's fingernails," Gibbs set the snare gently. Ryker knew Abby had not scratched him deeply enough to draw blood, so whatever was under her fingernails, it couldn't be his. Safe on the sidelines, there was no way he could resist such a golden opportunity to jerk a federal agent around.

"And if I don't 'volunteer'?"

"Then we get a judge to subpoena you, start an official police record."

Ryker leaned back, clearly enjoying playing Gibbs at the end of his line. "And if I volunteer, what happens when the samples don't match?"

"No subpoena, no record. You'll be free to go," Gibbs said sourly, appearing to struggle with something. "And the Director of NCIS will offer you an official apology."

"Official, huh? On the letter head and everything?"

Gibbs nodded. Ryker looked at him, all mockery gone, his eyes glittering with a malicious victory. "One condition."

"What?" Gibbs snapped, only half acting that this bargaining was burning a hole in his stomach.

"I want the apology to be from you. Directly from you."

In the observation room, Ziva looked sideways at Tony. "Hook, line, and sinker, yes?"

Tony glanced briefly aside. "Yes, actually."

Gibbs sucked in some air, giving every appearance of a man pushed hard against his breaking point. Struggling with pride and anger. Finally he nodded, a painful jerk. "From me. Personally."

Ryker's grin was shark like, and Gibbs, like a man trying to buoy up his lagging authority added, "If it doesn't match."

Tony and Ziva met him outside the interrogation room door. "Have Larkin Jones come up from the lab to get the DNA and hair samples," he ordered, looking hard at his senior field agent. "No screw ups on this, DiNozzo."

"Not a one, Boss," Tony promised.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Original Note:
> 
> _A/N: In the home stretch now folks. Two chapters to go. Whew!_


	12. Chapter 12

Test results took time. Not even Abby had been able to completely break that particular law.

Gibbs filled the time by getting coffee. He sat at his desk and read through the file one more time, but the wounded and wondering looks McGee sent his way were unhelpful. He would have to fix that, but not right now.

Eventually he gave up, and rode the elevator down to Autopsy. Inside, Ducky stood in scrubs and a surgical cap, working at one of the long steel tables.

"Got a hot one, Duck?"

"No, unfortunately not, Jethro." He carefully put his instruments down. "A clear cut case of death by animal attack. Seems this young lady was caught in a liaison with her married next door neighbor. When the wife came home she hopped the back yard fence, and the dog in the next yard over took her for a burglar.

He pulled his gloves and cap off. "But I'm guessing you didn't come down here to talk about the hidden dangers of extra-martial sex."

Gibbs dry washed his face with a hard hand. "No."

"So, the rumor of you having a suspect on Abby's case is true?"

Gibbs leaned against the edge of an unoccupied table. "Yep."

Ducky found is own leaning place. "And?"

"And you were right. This guy is all about power. Dominance. He's too arrogant to believe he's been caught. Right now he's sticking around because he's enjoying busting my balls."

"Has he? Been caught."

Gibbs shrugged. "Got the DNA running now. For what it's worth"

Ducky gave his old friend a long look, reading the tension in him. A tightly coiled spring that creaked under the pressure. He clicked his teeth together. Paused. Spoke. "I went to see Abby. At your house."

It got Gibbs attention. "How was she?"

"Damaged."

The conversation stumbled to a halt. Ducky could be blunt, but this was anger. An accusation Gibbs didn't know how to respond to. Or even why it was there.

Not to worry though, Ducky was not done. "You should be there, Jethro. Not out tilting at windmills."

"Interrogating the guy who raped her is hardly tilting at windmills." Gibbs snapped, but Ducky waved his words away with prejudice.

"You have this idea – you, and those three young agents that dog you so faithfully, that if you can just catch this man, lock him away, then all will be well. That Abby can get back to the business of being herself."

Stung by his old friends unexpected anger, Gibbs flung back, "You think I believe what happened to Abby can be fixed by a few pats on the head and some jail time? That I can't see how deep all this goes?"

But if Gibbs was gearing up for a fight, it seemed to have abruptly melted out of the other man. "No, Jethro. I know you understand. I just want to know why it has to be you."

"Why what has to be me?"

"That catches him!" Ducky said with weary exasperation. "That interrogates him. That puts him in jail. You four are so busy trying to get what you call justice that you can't even see Abby doesn't want you doing any of it." He slumped back in defeat. Already knowing he had not made his point. "Let the Metro detectives take over, Jethro. Abby needs her friends. Not a group of avenging angels."

When Gibbs finally spoke it was with a cold anger that made no room for friendship. "There's a man sitting upstairs that took Abby into a back alley last Saturday, Ducky. A dark deserted place where he beat her with his fists and ripped her clothes off while she screamed and tried to fight him off. Then he raped her and left her to die, or not. However God saw fit. You think I can ignore that?"

"No." Ducky said, his gait stiff as he walked back to the occupied autopsy table and picked up his instruments. "No I do not."

Gibbs watched Ducky's clear gesture of dismissal and knew the words had not been an absolution. He could see in the line of his shoulders an anger that would not dissipate quickly.

Well, he wasn't sure his would either.

Into the pointed silence Gibbs' phone rang. Seeing the extension for the lab, he flipped it open, but before he pressed it to his ear he said, "This is Abby we're talking about, Ducky."

Ducky stood over the autopsy table in the wake of Gibbs departure, scalpel poised while he watched the middle distance. Finally he put the blade down, sighing sadly. "Yes," he said to the empty lab, voice heavy with resignation. "All for Abby."

Looking down at the corpse he added, "Never forget the hubris of champions, my dear. They'll break your heart every time."

* * *

"Agent Gibbs!"

Gibbs once again ignored Larkin's greeting, smacking a coffee cup down on the lab bench hard enough to slosh some of the liquid out the drinking slot. But he didn't let go. "You have my hair samples?"

Larkin smiled. "I have better." He started ticking points off on his fingers.

"First: yes the suspect's DNA was a match for the 6 alleles I pulled from the skin cells under Abby's fingernails. Second: yes the suspects hair composition matchs the sample hairs within the 97 percent confidence level. Third: I found the remains of an ink stamp on the suspect's arm that matches the ink collected from Abby's hand to the 99.3 percent confidence level. Same pad, same stamp."

Gibbs let go of the coffee cup, giving a wry half smile. "Not bad for an FBI wank."

Larkin handed off the report, smiling at the praise, backhanded as it might be. But just as Gibbs reached the door he called out, "Special Agent Gibbs, you didn't let me finish my report."

Gibbs checked himself in the doorway, not turning around.

Larkin spoke to his back. "I also found minute traces of blood caught in the rivets of that knife Agent DiNozzo brought me. It matches the blood type and DNA characteristics of the victim's blood." He let it sink in. "It's Abigail Sciuto's blood, 100 percent match."

Gibbs closed his eyes. If it had been Abby he would have whirled her around the lab, kissed her cheek, told her good job. But this wasn't Abby, it was Larkin Jones. Who had indeed turned out to be very good at his job. Gibbs reached up, hit the door jam with the side of his fist. Then he walked on.

Still standing by the bench, Larkin used his own fist to more lightly repeat the gesture against the counter top, an unguarded grin splitting his face.

* * *

Once again, Gibbs stood on the observation side of the one way mirror, watching his suspect doze, chin sunk down between his collarbones.

This time no one came to interrupt. That was fine. He had the evidence now. And a plan. Didn't need anyone else.

He slammed the interrogation room door open, startling Ryker awake to jump and curse, glaring at the source of the surprise. Gibbs smiled insincerely while Ryker shrugged his coveralls back down his heavy shoulders, his glower full of ill suppressed threat. Gibbs let his simile grow a fraction stale. A man with too much training to show he was uneasy holding a wolf by the ears. Ryker's smile grew in response.

"Where were you last Saturday night?" Gibbs snapped, apparently peeved at Ryker's insolence.

"I thought you said I would be free to go."

"Tests are still running. In the meantime, we've got a few more questions."

Ryker sprawled back. "Shoot."

"What did you do last Saturday night?"

"Not much. Stayed in," he said without hesitation.

Gibbs' finger flicked towards Ryker's forearm. "That ink my tech pulled off your arm puts you at the same party that the victim attended Saturday night."

The easy line of Ryker's body pulled a little tight, anger breaking through his tone. "I thought you said the tests were still running."

Gibbs leaned forward, willingly closing the gap between them. "I lied."

They stared at each other; two dogs with lowered heads and raised hackles, ready to lunge for the throat. Then Gibbs broke, dropping his eyes down to the file in front of him. Ryker held for a moment longer, hammering home his victory, then leaned back again. "Sure, I was there. I just though the party had been on Friday night."

Gibbs pushed a skeptical sarcasm into his voice, sure to annoy. "Now that you remember being there, do you maybe remember seeing this woman?", tapping the photo of Abby's bruised face.

Ryker studied the picture with nonchalant attention. "Probably. There were a lot of people there. Can't say I remember her exactly."

"Maybe this will help." Gibbs laid down another picture that was much more typically Abby. Dark pigtails and a wide, wide smile.

Ryker glanced at it, shaking his head while his smile made a lie out of the denial. "Nope."

His eyes challenged Gibbs to make something of the lie. Gibbs clenched his teeth against the temptation. "You don't need to maybe think about it a little?"

Ryker lazed back, "No."

Gibbs leaned back in his seat, staring at his opponent like a man who knows full well he is being played, but without enough smarts to flank the opposition. Dramatic, but Ryker ate it right up. Subtlety was lost on peoplelike him. Full to brimming with self satisfaction and entitlement, blind to the idea that the sheep he was herding in circles might have paws instead of hooves.

Ryker drummed his fingers briefly against the table. "Know what I think, Agent Gibbs? I think you have nothing except a coincidental picture, and a stamp from a party that hundreds of people attended. I'm not even sure you have the jurisdiction to keep me here." He paused, and when Gibbs did not challenge, he stood up. "In fact, I'm leaving now."

It had worked. It had done the job. But now the false pelt was heavy, and Gibbs longed to be free. To shake it off and see the fear in Ryker's face when he realized his error.

"Sit down."

Low and steady, the voice was laced with enough control for the words to lap against the walls without rippling back. Ryker, half way through his first step paused in confusion, not understanding where it had come from. Full of menace, it had implied a level of violence that the ball-less fed across from him couldn't of dreamed of, let alone delivered.

Except, when he looked aside to see if another person had joined them in the little room he saw that the man at the table had changed considerably. In his place was someone made entirely of granite and hard command. When this man barked sit down for a second time, Ryker's knees folded without volition, landing him only partially in the chair.

"Now. Did you see this woman?" Gibbs said with the same voice, finger stabbing towards the picture on the table.

Ryker leaned forward to look, rubbing his hands across the knees of his jeans. "Yeah." His voice croaked and he had to clear his throat. "Yeah. I remember now. I saw her. She was wearing this red collar thing. It really stood out. That's why I remember."

Gibbs let the reason why Ryker might or might not remember Abby slide by. There were bigger things here. "Did you dance with her?"

"Yes. But that's – "

"Shut up." Gibbs interrupted. "Did you go into the alley behind the warehouse with her?"

"She wanted t – "

"Hey!" Gibbs barked, slamming his hand down on the table; a hollow boom that made Ryker jump back. "You think I care about your explanation? Yes, and No Those are the words you get here.

"Did you go into the alley with this woman?"

"Yes." Ryker ground out, eyes alight with a rage that only seconds ago he would have given vent to. Not now though. Gibbs had instilled a fear that crested the anger by inches. "But I didn't beat her up."

Gibbs eyebrows went up. "Then how did her blood get under the rivets of that knife thing you waved at one of my agents?"

"Is that it? Is that why you've kept me here?" Ryker scoffed, arms flying wide, eyes rolling. His anger over backing down to Gibbs creeping back in, stripping away the caution of before. "I lent a buddy of mine the knife a couple days back. He cut himself breaking down some cardboard boxes. He must not have cleaned it very well."

"It matches the victim's blood type," Gibbs said.

Ryker shrugged. "The rarest blood type in the US is AB negative: 0.6 percent of the population, which works out to 1.8 million people. Next up is B negative: 1.5 percent, 4.5 million people. Then A negative: 6.3 percent. Should I keep going?"

"Those are things a phlebotomist knows?"

"Every one of us." Ryker ground out.

"What about the statistics on DNA? Can you quote those?" Gibbs shot back.

It checked him, as intended. His answer came after a long hesitation, a pause to lick his lips. "DNA profiling takes weeks."

"Not for federal agencies."

Ryker glanced aside quickly. An instinctive seeking for help, or maybe escape. Gibbs, feeling something inside start a steady growling, slid a piece of paper over to where Ryker could see it. A lab report, dated and signed with chain of evidence signatures. Across the sheet two identical DNA chains spiraled. Ryker looked at it with a hand buried into his hair, tugging against the scalp.

When he looked up the desperation was real, but the anger was forced. "You faked this."

Gibbs dismissed his display without even the courtesy of consideration. "Hey asshole. Do you even know how much trouble you're in? Her blood on that blade proves Assault and Battery. That'll get you 2 years in the state pen. But we also pulled your DNA off her, and that proves rape."

Ryker went pale, his mouth sagging open. Slowly he crumpled forward, both his hands twisting back through his hair as he pulled himself inward. An collapsing star, with a rising keen the only thing strong enough to escape his heightened gravity.

He moaned, rocking, and Gibbs moved in for the kill strike, leaning forward to whisper like a confidant. "You raped a woman in an alleyway, Jack. Choked her, and beat her, and left gravel embedded in her back. And when you were done raping her, you cut her arms open and took a pint of her blood. You know what happens to freaks like that? We lock them in the deepest cell we can find, and we make sure they don't see another woman for a long, long time."

With a final pitch forward, Ryker crossed his event horizon. Exploding outward, face twisted into something too raw to be anything but all consuming.

"Is that what that bitch said? That I raped her? All I did was teach her a lesson." Ryker's face was dark with blood as he surged forward in his chair. Behind his back, Gibbs made a waiting motion towards the unease he could feel building behind the mirror. This was what he had wanted, this berserker rage. Hot enough to immolate caution and guile. But it was a dangerous game. The path of the juggernaut could never be predicted.

Quick as a snake strike Ryker proved the rule, refocusing on Gibbs. "And you, you goddamn faggot, sitting here questioning me. You should be thanking me. If you really do have enough of a dick to be tapping that. I taught that whore good about leading a man on."

"How," Gibbs asked against the thing that beat and clawed at his own throat. "How did she lead you on?"

Ryker answered with his own warped logic, face twisting in mournful self pity. "Do you have any idea what it's like? To need something that bad? To beg, and beg, and still have those bitches say no. No, no, no. That's all I hear. Even when I explained; just no.

"So yeah, I went to that party. I figured a warehouse full of freaks was the perfect place to find someone who understood how bad I hurt. And there she was." His eyes burned through the photo of Abby. "Dancing right in the middle of the action. And I mean right in the middle. All dressed up in these chains and tattoos. I thought she would be a score for sure. Except when I took out the knife she shook her head. Like she was some prim little fucking virgin. Like I was the freak. Me." Ryker slapped a hand to his chest, face twisted into a sneer. It made a meaty thumping sound.

His laughter was a manic cry of derision. "But you know what's the best? The best part?" He leaned forward with the anticipation of someone telling a dirty joke. "She cried. When I took what she owed me. Screamed like I was hurting her. But I know these things," his finger stabbed towards Gibbs, underlining his wisdom, "that whore was no virgin."

Gibbs felt it travel through him.

"You son of a bitch."

Ryker twitched at the malice on his face.

"You son of a bitch!" Gibbs lunged across the table. Ryker tried to get away, but the chair kept him pinned. He brought his arms up to ward off the hands locking around his throat but Gibbs slapped them aside like a mosquitoes buzz. The door slammed open as Ziva and Tony burst into the room, but nothing, not Tony's speed or Ziva's training could halt a Marine bent on death.

Momentum carried them over backwards, Ryker falling with the chair, Gibbs slithering over the table after him. He picked the bastard up by the neck, bashed his head against the floor. Did it again. And again. Until something caved in and his bulging eyes rolled back in his head, hands falling away slack.

It was close. It was so close.

He could feel each muscle, each separate movement of the picking up and the dashing down, the half conscious snarl of rage and victory that thrummed from deep in his chest. But he had been a federal agent for a long time, and the Agent understood something the Marine never had. Something he had forgotten, at the worst possible time.

Revenge could never be for anyone but yourself. This was Abby's justice. Not his. It had never been his.

Unlatching his hands from around Ryker's neck he let DiNozzo pull him away. Offering no resistance as Tony half frog-marched him into the far corner while Ziva prompted a coughing and spluttering Ryker back into a chair. Both agents looked at him out of the corner of their eyes, worry flicking between them like a Morse Code.

Standing between Gibbs and his quarry, Tony seemed undecided on whether to hold him back, or let him go. Gibbs made the decision for him by shaking off the hands that gripped him loosely.

"Take that piece of shit to the hospital to get checked out. Then take him over to the Metro station.Box up all the evidence and case notes, take them over also."

Then he walked out.


	13. Chapter 13

He found Abby in his bed. Awake. Curled on her side and staring into nothing. When he called her name softly from the doorway of the guest bedroom she did not look at him.

He crouched down by the bed, dismissing the twinge in his knees. "Hey," said softly. Finally she looked at him, but she had no words, just a wearily empty anticipation.

"Abby," he started again, but he had nothing after that. She broke into the silence by sitting up, watching him without expression.

"I'm tired of crying Gibbs. I just...I don't want to cry anymore."

He cocked his head, not sure where she was going.

"I cried," she told him in a low voice that was unbroken by emotion. "I told myself I wouldn't. When I knew I wasn't going to be able to stop him. That I would just turn my head and pretend it wasn't happening. But he wanted me to cry. He called me names, and just kept hitting me until I did."

Her eyes moved off him, but her voice kept on. "I couldn't even close my eyes. He told me when...when I was on the ground that if I closed my eyes he'd cut my eyelids off and I believed him. So you want to know what I remember, Gibbs? I remember his chin. I remember his chin really well."

He hadn't expected this. Her to tell him these things, when it hardly mattered if he knew anymore. It darted inside and Gibbs curled around the knot it made in his chest. Fought to breath, fought to keep his heart beating. It hurt to hear this. It surprised him how much it hurt.

There was protection in being an investigator. The ones that didn't burn out learned how to keep tragedy outside themselves. To listen to a victim's story as nothing more than a series of facts, always pressing them to remember more, think more, relive more. Sympathy without empathy, and only so far as it served to get the story.

Stripping that protection away, listening not just to Abby's words but to the things that echoed behind them, imagining those things; he thought it would kill him. But like the tide it crested, leveling to a point where he could again draw breath.

Now Abby was looking steadily at him again, waiting for his reaction.

Damaged, Ducky had said, and he hadn't stopped at what Jack Ryker had done. He had thrown the gates wide to include the actions of Leroy Jethro Gibbs. Not until he saw the wariness in Abby's eyes did Gibbs really understand what had made his friend so angry.

Abby had not called him to the hospital for vengeance. She had wanted his comfort and his safety. But all he had done since then was refuse her. By interviewing her like any other victim; by spending his time running around after the man who had hurt her; and by acting like throwing Jack Ryker in jail was some kind of Rubicon that could make her all better.

Those tears she was tired of crying were ones he had given her to cry, and her words had been a test.

It shivered through him, how close he had come to screwing it up. Without the warning of Ducky's baffling anger, he would have missed hers. He would have opened his mouth and tried to quench the burn of those memories by saying Jack Ryker was in jail, that he could never hurt her again.

The truth was, Jack Ryker would be hurting Abby for a long time to come. Nothing could change that. Except time. Understanding. Good friends. Not words. Certainly not the vengeance he had been so relentlessly pursuing.

Standing up, Gibbs pivoting around to sit next to her on the bed, using an arm to tuck her close beside him. He held her, rocking a little, until the stiffness went out of her muscles and she pressed her face against his neck, shoulders hitching in a single stifled sob.

"I'm sorry, Abby," he whispered against the crown of her head. "I'm sorry."

* * *

These are the moments they mark.

It takes a month for the last of the bruising to fade away. Six weeks is the first day back at work. Three and six months are celebrated with negative viral titers in Ducky's lab. The fourteenth month ends with a judge's gavel: 10 years of his life for half an hour of hers.

The return of hope is a moment shoved amongst a jumbled rush of misplaced keys and coffee and late that propels her past a strange male human with nothing more than a harried annoyance. Realization makes her stop short enough that he runs into her back. Before and After she understood, but the idea of after the After is completely new.

Feeling the snap and pull of her muscles as she tumbles a body over her hip, pivoting to warningly press the side of her foot into the flesh of the woman's throat, looking down at the surprised 'o' of her mouth, fingers wrapped around the offending shoe and her dark hair fanned out against the gym mat. It's a funny picture and she laughs as the other woman grumbles and accepts a hand up, but they both know something has changed. It's a tool now, not an exercise, and she feels solid and safe inside her own body.

She has a date, and he has (with his incredible and sadly unsung talent) weaseled all the pertinent details out of her. Who, what, when, and where. A background check shows two unpaid parking tickets, a very high credit score, and a nearly miraculously Alpha Chi Delta commonality. A lie gets him some face time, and his badge and gun get him a very sincere assurance of gentlemanly behavior. The next morning she gives him a sweet smile, and fist to the gut.

She lets her hair grow in blond, kept tight against her head. Then on a completely ordinary Tuesday he goes into her lab with coffee, for a kiss, and there are little nubs on either side of her head, held by twin electric pink bands. He reaches out to touch the bristled end of one with the tip of his finger, and her smile is wide and without a hint of shadow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Original Note:
> 
> _A/N: Well folks, here concludes the story. Now that I've enticed you into reading all the way to the end, I'll let you in on a secret. I've never done anything like this. I've always been good at writing, but this is my first try at carrying a plot through 60+ pages. Writing and editingf this took 8 months, some pretty icky research, and an incredible amount of thinking. In the end, I think I did okay, but success is, as ever, in the eye of the reader. If you think I carried it off, please, please tell me. If you have ideas on things I could do better, tell me that. If you think I did an awful job and should never be allowed near a keyboard again, you can tell me that too, but I'll only use one please._
> 
> _41º 32' 29''N, 066º 55' 43''W_


End file.
